


Castle, cast no shadow

by heartratemonitor



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Absolutely Terrible Lore Expansion Pack, Alternate Character Interpretation, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, False Identity, Father Figures, Imprisonment, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Occasional Body Horror, POV Alternating, Past Child Abuse, Power Imbalance, Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Teletransportation Paradox, Time Skips, Touch Aversion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:00:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 13
Words: 43,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21927820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartratemonitor/pseuds/heartratemonitor
Summary: His reflection says 38. Oleana’s hands and insistence says "ghost brought back from the dead, how dare they take him from me." He’d be 53 now, if time ran its course the way it should, and had not skipped him through like a rock across a pond and landed him on the other side, unscathed.In which containing people the way one contains pokemon has unintended effects, and Rose, fifteen years later, attempts a new life in Turrfield.
Relationships: Beet | Bede & Rose | Chairman Rose, Beet | Bede/Hop, Olive | Oleana/Rose | Chairman Rose
Comments: 98
Kudos: 137





	1. Satya, by the Stream

They release him around noon, with his worldly possessions. The white shirt hangs on him like sackcloth hung to dry on a brittle tree. He goes without vest or tie or jacket, mindful of muggy Galar summers. Two guards watch with plastered scowls as he struggles with the lone pearl earring; its long absence draws blood, a red Pollock abstraction on forefinger and thumb.

The sun is a piercing star overhead. It robs him of any shadow, and Rose feels more ghost than man. Excess clothes, safely in a plastic bag. Cheeky water bottle. Cold lunch. Heat less like a temperature and more like a second coat of paint. He wants to peel all of it off, scrub it clean, until layers of billboard paste and paper pool at his legs and leave nothing underneath but fresh wall.

Oleana has cleared her schedule to pick him up. What is he, a grade schooler?

_She has all your assets. Tone it down._

Technically, he has about as much rights as a grade schooler. Technically, even less. Can’t carry any pokemon. Can’t hold weapons. To be discussed and negotiated, of course, pending good behavior. Not that it matters. He’ll retire somewhere quiet and woodsy and reinvent himself as a gardener. Catch up on some light reading. Gain back the weight he lost.

All the cars look sci fi sleek, and even some of the buildings. They always warned about the cars. Jail is time travel of the mundane variety, and no one ever warns you of the catchup. 

Catchup. That’s funny. Even the rolex is loose. Rose wants to drop it in a nearby storm drain. Younger Rose, matryoska shelved and white-hot furious, tells him otherwise. It stays on his wrist. He fidgets with it, fingers finding the empty space, and barely registers his body on an outdoor bench.

Shiny Corviknight Car. Nondescript driver, and cropped blond hair in the passenger seat. His heart almost bubbles; spilling over parboiled. Oleana favors dark navy blue instead of red, shows no skin other than an older face and hands, and her hair is trimmed to chin length. Her silhouette, at least, leaves the same imprint: thin and sharp, a line in the sand. Her gaze rakes him open, like a butcher cuts open an animal; like the head of the table carves a holiday bird.

None of the trepidation reaches his eyes. He’s made sure of it. 

“Fifteen years,” he says in a folded neutral. “You look well. Thank you for-”

Ah. There’s hands on him. Too tight. _Let go, for the love of fuck,_ **_let go of me-_ **

“You look the same,” and then. “Have they been feeding you?” 

So fast, so soon. Confinement is compressed, a schedule of habits; a preplanned race track. Eventually they didn’t even offer him that. The years breezed by while he dreamt of white spaces, of cold that buries and lingers. Her touch burns him. 

Rose can’t complain. Rose doesn’t complain. She holds all his assets.

“It’s a long story,” he manages, as a slim hand leads him onto the passenger seat.

_Stop touching me._

She strokes his arm. He surveys the view; spires viciously glitter. She was never like this, not before. She owns the shares now. The years made her bold, and he ought to be prouder, but the touch burns like coals and damnation and he wants to open the door and drop like dead weight. He is dead weight. Oleana won’t stop. She must think this is comforting. 

It’s supposed to be. He’s just built wrong.

“Anything on the itinerary?” Rose asks, because he ought to.

“Rest,” she orders.

“Had plenty, already.”

“Have some more, then.” A hand over his. “You’ve earned it.”

She’s older than him now, on a technicality. On a count of being frozen in place like bad deli meat with freeze burn. A cursory graze at a mounted telly shows that confinement balls for humans have been mass adopted in Kalos, praised for its space saving measures. Unova is more hesitant- they do love their free labor. 10 percent chance of unintended effects; negligible enough for nonpersons.

His reflection says 38. The mist of sleep hazing behind his eyes says 38, with some pounds off, because prison food is shite, ey, lads? Oleana’s hands and insistence says _ghost brought back from the dead, how dare they take him from me._ He’d be 53 now, if time ran its course the way it should, and had not skipped him through like a rock across a pond and landed him on the other side, unscathed. Maybe Oleana would touch him less.

It’s a long distance crossed before Rose realizes that he hasn’t even asked her where they are headed. The topography vaguely says Turrfield, with more buildings. It doesn’t matter. He surrendered his subsidiaries to capable hands. There’s only small mercies from here on out.

Should he feel unburdened? Should he feel free? Should he feel empty? 

Because right now, he feels nothing.

Oleana leans against his side, overdressed and overwarm. Nothing, and that. 

* * *

The Turrfield house is small, pretty, and out of the way. Oleana had picked it out for its sunrise view, and its distance: far enough away from the gym and prying eyes, but close enough to amenities. Does she expect him to write the second coming of Walden? She claims that she’ll visit on weekends, schedule permitting. He’s offered a baby locked checking account, and a phone so slim that it feels like a feather in his hands. He feels like a ward of the state.

_Aren’t you?_

“The fresh air would do you some good,” Oleana says with a practiced smile, but her eyes are wild and strange, desperate for weakness hidden in the cracks. Just regular old desperate, too. _Role reversal. Power dynamics. Synergy._ Maybe he’ll try his hand at a garden. Maybe he’ll never leave the house. Either or suits him fine.

“Thank you,” Rose says. “It’s charming. Very bright. The lace curtains aren’t my usual taste, but I’m certain they’ll grow on me.”

“Can I call you by your first name?” Oleana asks, sudden and overbearing. Her hands reach for his shoulders. _Please, please, don’t touch me._ He mirrors her smile.

“Which one?” he replies, though he knows it’s a mistake. You don’t give true names in strange lands, and this definitely counts. His existence has always been a point of contention, from birth and name _. Keep the baby. Don’t keep the baby. Baby has a normal name. That name won’t get him a normal job. God, George, let me have this. Please let me have this. They’ve taken everything else._

“Pardon?” she says, and her nesting doll opens, unveiling someone young and frightened.

“Satya, or Alex,” Rose replies with an evenness for choosing between coffee or tea. He pictures his innards laid out on the kitchen table like an abstract dessert. Head of the traitor. Judith holding Holofernes by the scalp. Blood brightly splashing over Oleana’s faded blues.

“Satya,” she says, like tasting a ripened fruit. This is a mistake. All of this was a mistake. “Satya. That’s lovely. What does it mean?”

“Unisex name. It means _truth_.” He can’t help but laugh afterwards, but hopefully it comes off as inoffensive. “My father wanted Alex, so it’s Alex on all the papers. You’ll be the only one to call me the other besides my mum.”

Apparently this warrants an embrace. She was never this touchy before. _Tone it down. Best behavior. Only thing you have left. Holy objects burn unholy objects. Bless with water. Bless with fire. Scald, supereffective._ Her body is a burning comet. It crushes him.

“Satya,” she repeats, equal parts blessing and curse. “I’ll see you next week. There’s guides loaded on the phone, if you get lost around town. Don’t hesitate to call me if any emergency arises.”

“Take care,” he finds himself saying on autopilot, and waves goodbye as she closes the door behind him.

Once fully alone, the first thing he does is find the bathroom. It’s clean and excessively wildflower themed- grandma lace and little florals. The whole house is like this, though neutral enough not to be too feminine. Just… Old. Too old. Not enough angular shapes. Wood carved everything. As if his face alone didn’t make him feel enough like a time traveler.

No automatic flush. Small mercies.

He immediately regrets looking at himself in the mirror. Prison razors were cheap disposables, offered at 8am and confiscated by 9am, and his signature look doesn’t involve a patchy 5 o’clock shadow. He has the gaunt, sickly appearance of someone who’s lost weight too quickly, and his skin is a touch lighter from lack of regular sun. His hair is uniform jail trim, and the whole of him screams _impostor._ Doppelganger. Rose as a fugue, or a distant second cousin.

It works out, in a roundabout way. No one will recognize him, and certainly not at grandma's house in Turrfield.

The phone has very few of his old associates, not that he expects them to call. They have their cake now. They don’t need him.

May as well go grocery shopping.

* * *

Milo entertains for three this weekend, and plans accordingly. Extra cheeses. Fancy crackers Kabu likes. Dehydrated vegetable chips. Kale, maybe? Does Nessa still like kale? Seitan is a safe enough choice for the main course. They still sell those sausages here.

He finds the stranger struggling at self-checkout with a curious selection. Prepackaged naan, odd boxes of tea, several cartons of seasonal plums, and very little else in the way of actually edible. He’s familiar in the way that actions in dreams are caught in limbo, and you’re left wondering if you really called your long lost friend, or if you only made up the scenario. The clothes are odd fitting. He considers two boxes, one for _refugee_ and another for _recently divorced husband who moved away to reinvent himself, and left the lady of the house to do all the shopping._

 _Do you need help,_ he almost says, but the man figures it out quickly enough. He double bags, and Milo watches his figure shrink in the distance, slowly but surely headed to the further end of town, close to the foot of the stream. No one’s lived in that isolated house in years, he thinks. 

Third box: _eccentric writer who wants to write Walden redux and used to order all his groceries online._

It still doesn’t feel right. Milo dismisses it. He shops here, and that leaves another time to pester the man with questions. A more pertinent one that needs answering is kale chips or no kale chips. If he answers wrong, Nessa will have his head.

* * *

It’s been fifteen years since he’s been locked away, but it’s been even longer since he’s had to do grocery shopping on his own. A list would have been beneficial, in hindsight. He makes one on the smartphone, for next time. Likely tomorrow. Bread and plums barely qualify as a meal.

Heavens, does his stomach not know the difference, though. It lasts three days. He spends half of the time pacing a hard path in the living room and browsing the phone. _There’s so much time in the day._ He spends the other half catching up on reading. _There’s too much time in the day._ Gardening as a concept grows ever more appealing by the hour. _Why do people ever retire?_

There’s enough in his account to live comfortably, idle and purposeless. Most people would dream of such a life. He dreamt of such a life, back then. _My Satya,_ his mother would say. _Get out of this hole, for me. You’ll get me a house, won’t you?_

On the fourth day, he figures that his stomach can hold exactly one serving of naan and two plums before he grows ill, and keeps this in mind for the following grocery outing. Milo’s there again, shopping for groceries instead of party food. The man has the sort of rounded face that ages well, though his body is sharper, and less inclined to wear shorts, it seems. 

He doesn’t recognize him. Larger mercies.

Polite tap on the shoulder. There it goes. “You’re new to town, aren’t you? Would you like a tour? Name’s Milo.”

“Satya,” Rose says, taking the offered hand. “No thank you. Phone tells me all that. Kind of you to offer, though.”

“You seem familiar,” Milo says thoughtfully, effortlessly smoothing out the rejection. “Maybe we met in another life. I’m always here if you change your mind.”

“I have one of those faces.”

Too many groceries. What a gross miscalculation. He optimized the purchases for as few return trips as possible, but forgot to consider that he’s not entitled to his Copperajah to lug the weight. Milo, quick on the draw, takes four of six bags.

“That’s really not necessary,” Rose starts, but Milo is already walking.

Heavens, he’s forgotten that persistent effusiveness. Milo knows where he lives, now. Milo may potentially tell others about him. His cover is blown.

“No worries! Satya, was it? Everyone needs a helping hand once in a while.”

Milo knows _Satya,_ an odd little man in his late 30s who lives in a charming house by the stream. Satya is three sizes smaller than Rose. Rose has no business living in a cottage in Turrfield, and outside of two prison guards in Wyndon, possibly a cabbie, and Oleana, no one knows that Satya and Rose are one and the same.

“Well, thank you for the _helping hand,”_ Rose says with a bit too much simpering. “I’m not as strong as I used to be.”

“Neither am I!” Milo offers, all too quick to allow himself inside and help him load groceries into their proper slots. “No one tells you about the back pain. Just comes like a thief in the night when the 30s creep in. Easy enough to mitigate with diet and exercise.”

Is that the sort of thing that comes with status? Just. Walk in like you own the place. _Satya, don’t overwork yourself. Satya, how are the hours? Satya, I’m so proud of you!_

How easy it is to forget.

“What do you do for a living?” Milo asks, surveying the lace doilies. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Niche fiction,” Rose says before he can stop himself, and quickly adds, “Under a pseudonym.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be that Chuck Tingle fellow, would you?” His grin spans mile wide, almost contagious. “Is that top secret? No, don’t tell me!”

“...I have no idea who that is.”

Milo breathes an audible sigh of relief. “Well, it’s probably better that you don’t. I’m heading off, but let’s exchange numbers first. It’s dangerous to live alone.”

Rose almost hesitates, but then remembers that the line Oleana provided is new and unlisted. Milo lists him under _Satya Nadella;_ his not-name and his mother’s maiden name. _Alex Rose_ creaks under the floorboards, half man and half ghost. He’ll cast no shadows here.

Rose claws red marks on wood, buried alive, but Satya smiles and shakes Milo’s hand.


	2. My Child, Who Has Damned Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oleana comes to visit.
> 
> (TW for mild psychological horror)

It’s strictly formality, for Rose to plug in everyone he used to know in a search bar. Leon’s thriving battle tower. Nessa’s entourage of hopeful models, cycled per season. Piers has made a name for himself mastering at least four unusual instruments a year. Milo has five salads named after his town. Biodegradable hand warmers with Kabu on the package. Little blurbs. Little blossoms that are gardens now, without space for him.

> (Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
> 
> Oh, where hae ye been?
> 
> They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
> 
> And laid him on the green.)

Laid him on the green. Laid him on the green to rot. Green with envy. Grave white with indifference.

He turns to a classical radio channel, and finds a duet with Piers and- Marnie? Is that her name? _La Table Ronde,_ played on cello and ehru. On its square cover, the cello engulfs this dark slip of a woman, ink hair wild and untied, while Piers sports uniform, tidy black and a shorter cut than Rose remembers. He wields the slim instrument upright, like a torch lit on fire.

The sound reminds him of rain slapping over a tin roof and gray clouds. It’s a pale September afternoon, but the sky is clear. It certainly feels like rain. He’s buried shallow, with broken chips of wishing stars, and the water slams against wet grass and loam. Eternatus is in the pocket of a 25 year old woman, toothless and compliant. Rose is in the pocket of a 45 year old woman, reformed and strangely shaped.

Oleana will never call him Rose again, now that he’s given her Satya. She’s coming over at noon.

Will Oleana pass him a cut? A bit of his dignity like sloppy seconds picked from the ground, dusted off and returned to the table. _Five second rule, it’s still edible!_ He hasn’t even bothered with breakfast. It’s too easy to forget, in between consuming 200 pages of public domain classical literature and indulging in occasional self pity. 

Cellular growth that grows large eventually becomes cancerous. Cut off a leg to save the body. Is he the leg? Marco Cosmos and its thousand limbs, like a hungry spider clutching Galar in its loving arms. It really did grow too big, in retrospect. Oleana kept track of all the leaks in the capillaries; made sure the pipes were clean. He grew complacent, promptly felled by arrogance and impatience.

The wishing stars really could have waited. Hindsight has perfect vision.

Satya by the stream. That’s all that is left to him. Oleana rings the doorbell; it can’t be anyone else. He answers, and immediately her hands are on him, burning like prods. She never used to touch him so ardently, not before. The years have authorized her claim on his flesh. Rose doesn’t flinch. 

Her dress is forest green. She left him clothes in the cabin, but they’re fitted to a past shadow and pool loosely over his limbs. All light colors; nothing to stimulate any strong emotion. He thinks he’s wearing sea blue and khaki, but he doesn’t know exactly, and hasn’t cared enough to check.

“Satya, how is the place? Are you well?” Oleana asks, her fingers clasped around his jaw. Rose pictures her snapping his neck like this. He smiles back.

_Laid him on the green. Lady Mondegreen. Oleana, dressed in green._

“I’m doing fine. You didn’t have to come, for my sake. I’m certain you’re busy.”

_Please, please, I beg of you, let go of me._

“Nonsense. After all you’ve done for me? I’ll make time.”

She’s fifteen years older than him. The Galar Gym Crew are mostly scraping mid to late thirties. Opal’s still alive; blood debt, likely. Is he, too? Is this living?

“You look so young,” she says with a sharp inhale, pulling him into her arms. 

_Satya._ Second of five Yamas. Speak, act, and think with integrity. Restrain yourself from falsehood.

“Oleana,” he starts, momentarily overwhelmed. “You were not much of a hugger, before.”

“I- do you dislike it?”

The last thing he wants is to break her heart. After a lifetime of sloppy seconds and waiting on him, he owes her that much.

“Neutral,” Rose lies, fading into Satya. She’s too close to his neck.

 _Mondegreens,_ he thinks. A misheard lyric. A truth, but not the truth.

Her mouth is over his. 

Rose blinks. They’re in the living room, right? Or maybe, the kitchen? She was thirteen when they first met, and he was twenty. The alternative energy startup flourished. She was a surrogate sister then, to be plied with candies and fancy dolls. He had no idea how children worked, having been denied a childhood himself. Keep them fed and give them toys once in a while. That’s how it worked, right? He always wanted one of those transforming robot things.

“Oleana,” he says, louder. He pushes her away, muscles weak and atrophied from cold storage. 

She’s apologizing. So many apologies, but she‘s still touching him. Folding clean the dents. _Only one you have left,_ a voice screeches, Zubat sharp.

_Ahimsa. Satya. Asteya._

His mother never touched him much, either. He is the product of an act of violence. He gave that woman a house. She was owed a house. What does he owe Oleana?

_Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Bramacharya, Aparigraha._

“I’m sorry,” she says mournfully. She looks like she’s seconds from weeping. “I’m sorry, Satya. I’m sorry.”

“Please, don’t cry,” Rose begs impotently.

The uncap their matryoshkas in the privacy of a secluded kitchen. Oleana is thirteen years old in a dress caked with mud, and Rose is nineteen- twenty in two days, black jacket over white tee, with department store khakis. He offers her his hand. Her eyes are like stars, or an asteroid to end an age. 

She crashes into his body. Time snaps back into place.

> (Now wae be to thee, Huntly!
> 
> And wherefore did you sae?
> 
> I bade you bring him wi you,
> 
> But forbade you him to slay.)

At some point she offers to cook them both lunch, and stares down Rose like a stranger when he says he isn’t hungry. He is a stranger, on a technicality. Even he has no idea who he is. Rose-Satya, truth stained pink at the corners. Oleana tosses vegetables and preserved meats into a stew. He still isn’t hungry.

“How’s the company faring?” he asks, to kill the empty space.

He already knows the answer because he looked it up on the phone this morning. Finicky stocks. There’s competition from some young whippersnapper who wants to use Solrock fragments as an alternative source. A growing movement of DIY solar power too, spurned on by several bespoke panel companies. “Just have your ‘mon cast a beam of your liking!”

The house he lives in has solar roofing, styled to resemble ordinary shingles. Oleana has inherited a dead horse. He should just suck it up and let her kiss him.

“Fine,” she says. Both of them are lying, then. “Not much to report. You needn’t concern yourself with that.”

“Looks like I’ve retired early,” He offers with a self-effacing laugh. “I suppose 50s is in the calculations, if you have enough.”

“I can’t get used to it.” Her fingers grip the lace placemats. “Arceus, you haven’t aged a day. I was broken up when they took you. I knew the company was in capable hands, but you were gone like a ghost, and no one cared. No one cared! You were erased from existence and I was the only one left with your memory.”

Rose says nothing. He smoothes out crumples forming on the doilies instead.

_You’ll give me a house, won’t you Satya? They’ve taken everything from me, Satya. You’ll get your poor mother out of this hole!_

_YOU’VE DAMNED ME TO THIS HELL, SATYA! YOU OWE ME THAT MUCH! DAMN YOU!_

_I wouldn’t mind disappearing from memory,_ Rose thinks, but does not say.

Oleana holds him again. This time, he allows it.

* * *

In the blinding light of containment, Rose casts no shadow. He’s a soul suspended, flesh pried away like rotten peels of a banana. There’s only cold. There’s cold and judgement. There’s counting to twenty. There’s counting to one hundred. There’s counting to five.

Ahimsa-

Satya-

How do pokemon deal inside box PCs? Language breaks down into sounds without meaning. Pokemon aren’t alone in PCs. They have friends. What are humans without organs or flesh or bone? Light, or a charcoal mark of shadow? He’s a watercolor stain without water. He’s a human imprint left over from a nuclear glow.

One- Two- Three-

Ikk- Do- Tinn-

Un- Deux- Trois-

_Kage no nai hito,_ says Kabu, gravelly and cruel. If Rose could still make sound, he would scream. Beg, maybe. He used to know how to beg. He can pick it up again if he needs to.

What is a human who casts no shadow? What is a human who takes no mass?

_Casts no shadow. Casts no shadow. Casts no shadow._

He clamps fists over his ears. He has no fists, nor ears. He has none of these things. He forms no penumbras, hung in a noose of light. He sobs without sound, and thinks of Oleana.

* * *

He’s twenty and holding a young girl by her hand.

* * *

He’s thirty-eight (fifty-three???) and holding a woman by her hand.

* * *

Oleana’s mouth is on his forehead. They’re in Turrfield, in his living room. He does not push her away, even if this hurts him. Oleana’s hands are on his- on somewhere. He has a body. Yes. He has a body right now. They’re on the couch? Yes. Couch. He is no longer a formless pillar of light. She’s holding him. He feels like wax held too close to a lamp, melting into shapelessness.

“Satya, was I too forward? I’m sorry. I’ve loved you for so long.”

Rose says nothing.

Satya strokes her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrote horror(?????) for Christmas, as one does.


	3. Visitations at a Silent Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meetings of different kinds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (TW for prison relations, and uncomfortable sex. This fic is Dead Dove so you know what you came here for.)

The system allots Rose three visits a month. His only one for September is Leon, civilian clean with hair out of the way. There’s glass dividing them, as well as something larger, taking occupancy and shape as the former champion folds his hands together over the white of the booth. His mouth forms a hard neutral. Satya - the half shadow, doesn’t exist yet, but Satya, the pet name, sleeps while wedged between pages of memory. Rose smiles, thin and clinical.

“I’m buying Rose Tower,” Leon starts, firm and even. “I’m converting it to use for battles.”

“Are you here to ask for my blessing?”

“I’m here to inform you,” he answers. Then, quieter: “I don’t understand. You threw everything on a lark, and then just let them take you away. Why?”

Rose is not one to lie to Leon- the man is the closest thing he’ll ever have to a son. He’s not one to tell the truth, either, but Satya is a resting snake and the innocents have yet to sink their teeth in figs. If it’s any lie, it’s through omission, rather than blatant mistruth. 

“Is it not better to go quietly?” he asks, as though a lack of self preservation is something easy to dismiss. “I apologize for the risk of injury I’ve caused you. I’m sure whatever you make of my property is safe under your capable hands.”

20,000 years ago, Eternatus fell to the earth, fetal cocoon in a foreign land. He thinks of hideous neutron stars, collapsed smaller than a large city and holding more mass than several suns. He wonders how much anger Leon has folded in on himself today, compressed small and heated in his chest. Not enough to power Galar, but plenty for Rose to feel regret.

“It’s like you threw all your logic down the crapper that day. I don’t get it.” 

Leon wrings his hands. Satya sleeps. Rose debates telling the truth, or at least, showing a bit of truth’s leg.

“I’ve been very tired,” he says, nebulous, and mentally unearths his younger self. “It clouded my judgment.”

He opens the latch of the coffin, while Leon watches his smile growing wider. Eternatus would rampage, and the heat of its terror would unleash enough energy for more than another thousand years. Galar, so accustomed to victory without conquest, would have to earn their happy ending.

Rose remembers the mines. Wring him dry of any other memory, and he will still remember the mines, and his mother. Of needing to earn spoils while others grow spoiled, unearned. 

Is it not right to ask for recompense? Leon wouldn’t know. Leon hasn’t earned the right to know, not yet.

He leaves without his question answered. Satya, in his corpse-sleep, smiles.

* * *

  
  


Is it not right to allow Oleana her plunder?

If he craves recompense, then it’s only even. _Transactional,_ his mind rationalizes, but then remembers her, much smaller, in her dirty dress. _Her favorite stuffed animals were pink,_ Satya babbles while she unbuttons his shirt. He’s bones under there; bones and deflated pouches. They’re- bedroom. They’re in the bedroom. It’s so hard to quantify space and distance sometimes, after fifteen years laid him out in an endless, unpunctuated line. Bedroom. Memory from five years ago. Bland naan and expired plums. An anchor of taste. An exclamation point of fingernails. Bedroom. Sheets. His dress shirt on the floor. Oleana’s wide eyes as he takes her small hands on his own.

How many days has it been since he moved into this house? Four? Five? Is it Saturday, or is it Sunday?

“-Loved you for so long-”

“-is this alright?”

“-Ah...”

It’s present day and Oleana is doing her best to try to make him hard.

It’s an unknown time and place. His shadow is red and shivering.

It’s past day and Leon is crying. He misses his parents.

It’s-

Galar. Turrfield. House. Bedroom. Bed. Oleana’s breasts. Oleana’s nails. Oleana’s hair, chin short and willow weeping over his cheeks. He thinks he’s crying. He doesn’t know. His hands grasp her waist, because finding purchase on- on the- on the bed? On the bed is not enough. Her body is a comet, a neutron star goliath in his white horizon. 

He melts while he chases the sun.

“Satya,” she murmurs, her rhythm like the lazy meanderings of the stream outside his home. He’s a match sizzling to life, all of his nerves lit in self-immolation. _Jaujar_ is for protesters and holy men; there is nothing holy about allowing this. Oleana- _fuck,_ underweight, small for her age, wailing from hunger- _damn you,_ _Satya,_ _you’ve damned me-_

“Oleana,” Rose chokes. He feels tears on his face. He doesn’t recall when they left his ducts, but he feels them now, rapidly drying. Turrfield-House-Bedroom-Bed clicks like setting a bone that’s been dislodged: a rush of pain at first, then firm solidity.

Solidity, as it turns out, proves unbearable. The sheets prick like a thousand pins on his back, rough with every minute motion of their- their lovemaking? _On a technicality,_ Satya jokes, and Rose swats the voice away without hands. It’s a little too cold- has he ever turned the heat on in the house? Has he really been spending early October without a sweater? There’s sweat on his hands, and sweat everywhere; he wants to retch at the thought of it. There’s slick and sheen in the juncture between Oleana’s slim legs and his flesh.

She mouths soft nothings over his neck. He can’t make any of it out. There is just. So much. So much of it. So much of anything. Too cold. Too sweaty. Too much lunch in his stomach. Too little lunch. The feeling of emptiness and the feeling of occupying too much space. He can’t push her off him; that would be rude. He can’t stay here, because it feels like he’s dying.

He’s choosing dying over being rude. Mercies. All shapes and sizes. So plentiful.

If he pictures folding laundry he can fold this down too. Lower the- the everything, to a tolerable volume. There is so much everything. An excess of everything, quite frankly. The blood between his legs. The heat of her core. Her lips and the weight of her breasts. Her nipples scratching over the peppering of hair on his chest.

It’s present day, present time. It’s too much already. He’s crying.

Does she like that he’s crying? Because so is she. It must be proof of consummation of some sort. Reconciliation. Tidy knots. Endings. Rose doesn’t have the heart to say otherwise. To correct her would be cruel.

* * *

It’s the past, in present tense.

Rose is annoying the guard. He’s made a game out of it while they shuffle him in between appointments. Today, the topic is sky burial. He lovingly describes body disposal, to be pecked at by birds and returned to the earth. The body is an empty vessel, and the poor are often overseers, hacking at smaller and smaller pieces of flesh for smaller and smaller birds, until the leftovers and brittle bones are ground into pieces to mix with flour and butter, for the smallest of nature’s flying rats.

“Would a Galar-style burial feature Rookidees? Have the Corviknights tear out the largest chunks first.”

“They were right about you.”

“Oh good, I hate to disappoint.”

He doesn’t do this to all the employees- only the unpleasant ones. Harry Hotshot takes his stress out on the pretty, small things, in exchange for cigarettes and credit for the commissary. Too quick to stiff them on his end of the bargain, depending on his mood. Rose is not pretty, but he is getting smaller. He wants to tear this man’s eye out with a biro, after what he’s seen. Today, he settles for unsettling him.

“There’s these lovely structures- I believe you Galarians called them Towers of Silence. An empty vessel is unholy and spreads infection, and that’s where you’d dump the bodies. As of late, a fair share of them have been converted to house solar panels instead of corpses. Dwindling scavenger bird population, and all that.”

“Fuck, what is your problem?!”

He’s going to strike him. Rose smiles wide with anticipation.

“Oh come on now, Harry Pincushion! This is foreplay compared to what you do with the cute lads in low security.”

_Satya_ _damn you damn you damn you damn you ruined me ruined me ruined me_

Harry’s fist connects with his nose. There’s no way to hide this for the doctor’s appointment. Resisting, sir. His hands are cuffed behind him. Resisting. 15 pounds lighter. Resisting. Harry Smallprick will get laid off, with one more infraction. Maybe he has children to feed. Those children can starve, Rose thinks. He starved, and he’s fine now. He turned out fine.

Rose laughs; it’s boiled water spilling into flesh. He can’t stop laughing. Harry’s kneecap ram into his stomach. Stand up comedy. Children smiling. Donation starters! Light and hope!

He spits blood on the bastard’s shoe, teeth red-white and gleaming.

“Harder, baby,” Satya says, and Harry complies.

* * *

As it turns out, _pretty_ is entirely subjective. Rose is close to flattered, circumstances notwithstanding. His- his suitor is a large mountain passing off as human, more boulder than guard. “Yer not like the rest of them. You tried te’ help us,” Jack says, as though attempt and success are one and the same. Rose chalks it up to delusion, or potentially, appearance- he doesn’t look the part of a blueblood, so surely he strays far from their ilk. 

“You smoke?” the guard asks in between- gods Rose does not remember. Scattered, unstructured time. He can grasp them with his fists, but some will still spill through gaps between his hands.

“Never picked up the vice,” He answers tightly. One less terrible habit to hold like bait over his hands.

He’s heard of this, when he was younger. Some girl who used to go to his father’s school who got with the wrong crowd. They’d widthold necessities- tampons, toothbrushes, and barter them back in exchange for a pound of flesh. She killed herself when he was six, mentioned as an afterthought in the morning obituary.

 _Obituary._ A long word for a child, but not for Rose. 

_Humiliation of humiliations,_ Rose grits. _I am not sucking your wanker for a chocolate bar._

He’s old staff, with a tenure of seven years, but Rose is new, and thirty pounds deep into a diet he did not consent to. Nothing here resembles food- it is a pale imitation, diluted with water and thin mirages. Surely his dignity is worth more than a sweet, but the proposition would tempt him if he were a lesser man.

Jack is patient, but so is Rose. He’s worked in the mines, after all.

“Really? Ye’ used to toil away there, like the rest uv us? Guess that explains it. Not cut from their cloth.”

Flattery. Lies. Sleeping snake at the foot of the tree. Vultures at the Tower of Silence.

 _Pidoves take your corpse,_ Rose doesn’t say. 

_Obituary-_ a synonym for non-regulation soap that ultimately forces him to relent. The liquid concoction at the shower dispensers makes him break out in hives. Handjobs only is his sole stipulation, to prevent infection. Jack, a ruddy closeted homosexual, takes his inch and goes the whole mile. Damn bastard keeps copping a feel, multiple feels, as if foreplay is a requirement for a meeting so base. 

“Is this nice?” He’d ask. 

“Yes,” Rose would lie. _Rookidees take your eyes._

Satya laughs, and makes no sound.

* * *

They’re eating Oleana’s stew. Or rather, Oleana, is eating Oleana’s stew, while Rose drinks fluid from the corners, and consumes exactly two squares of potato.

“I need to schedule you a doctor’s appointment,” she says, watching him poke holes into the vegetables with a frown. “You’re underweight. The low appetite is a big red flag.”

“Everything tastes too much,” he says, and Oleana’s eyes bulge like warts at the words. “Too strong, I mean. Didn’t have much of an appetite in my few months in jail, but for different reasons. It isn’t a debilitating issue, though.”

“I insist,” Oleana pushes, and he’s reminded of his mother, if his mother actually cared for him enough to be concerned. Essentially, he’s not reminded of his mother at all, but the mother shaped hole his mother was, and Oleana is adamant into slotting into.

She’s thirteen and he’s twenty. He’s buying her a burger from a new, Unova style diner.

She’s forty-five and he’s thirty-eight. She’s insisting he go for a checkup next week.

* * *

Jack brings soap, and milk chocolate balls. Rose has already traded away his pride, but he nearly wants to be a prat and ask for dark chocolate next time, with dried raspberry pieces. In an hour, he will meet with a jail psychologist to discuss (disgust) long term goals, but the guard lets him out early, for alone time in the office.

 _Alone together,_ Satya coos.

“I miss you in those suits,” Jack says, while Rose skims the nutritional facts for lies.

First ingredient: Sugar. Already not worth his time. Second ingredient: vegetable oil. Jack ghosts behind his neck and leaves an imprint of his mouth where his spine meets his skull. He really should suck some dicks outside, already. No one will think less of him.

_Lindt truffles, Jack. You really tried. Did you get them at a gas station on the way to work, to try to impress me?_

It’s not even the whole bag. There’s a sizable dent in the container, where the red wrapped treats and caramel flavored should have been. Gods no, this fucker has kids.

 _Am I your leftovers, Jack?_ Rose wants to say, but shuts his mouth with 60 percent extra dark, wrapped in black.

“You like those? They’re too bitter for my taste.” Jack ventures towards his ear, tongue at the shell. Third ingredient-

“I prefer chocolate 40 to 70 percent dark,” Rose says carefully, pocketing the rest.

“Need more sweet in yer life, baby.”

Fourth ingredient: chocolate. Rose breathes out. “I’ll take it into consideration.”


	4. Ishmael, the Silent Sentinel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dear Readers, I wrote this fic as a vent on Christmas season but it grew legs and a plot. Dead doves ahead.
> 
> Also if it isn't abundantly clear, this Rose isn't Gift Horses continuity.

Flicker of a slim phone. Marnie and Piers are uneven reflections in a dirty room, armed with cello and erhu, respectively. The wall behind them is brick solid, window behind them a billowing of sumptuous nuclear red. Piers, dressed in white, begins to play. The camera zooms close to Marnie’s lips, wine red. Her comet white voice is the even hand of judgment.

_“It depends on surface area. Whether you do, whether you don't.”_

Piers follows after; he’s less prone to screaming and flashiness these days, but the years had honed his technique. Electronics get smaller the more advanced they get- in his late thirties he’s discarded all the excess in favor of precision.

_“Climb a mountain, run a thousand miles. Grab on and hold, grab on and hold.”_

Bede turns up the volume, and puts the phone in his pocket. He starts to run as Marnie and Piers sing in unison; a fusion of disparate pieces greater than the sum of its parts.

_“It's a myth to behold, it's a fire in the cold! Grab on and hold, grab on and hold! It's a snake in the grass, it's a stop sign to pass! Grab on and hold, grab on and hold!”_

“This ain’t no hymn! This ain’t no hymn!” he bolts out along the siblings in his 5am run, because he’s alone and no one is watching. His singing voice is shit. No one’s around to hear it. “This ain't no warning to run from sin! This ain't no dagger for sticking in!”

It’s October, and he’s vowed not to slack off on morning jogs in winter months. Daily routine is the key to good mental hygiene. Winter’s coming. Winter is off season, and winter is also Seasonal Affective Disorder season. Winter is when Opal’s joints get really bad. Winter is when Rose gave him Solosis. 

Bede stops to catch his breath. Ballonlea’s canopy of trees obscure daylight with particular cruelty in the darker season. Maybe he should buy another sunlamp. Or get a rental Solrock. The Vitamin D isn’t working.

 _“So let me be,”_ Marnie tells him under his headphones, her voice like a spell, or a curse that will follow his children. _“I’ll follow something that I can see. I’ll worship something that I can be.”_

 _Sound advice,_ Bede thinks, but easier said than done. He still has to try.

After the run, he showers and takes a flying taxi to Turrfield. Opal’s particular brand of tea that she uses as a sleep aid and pain reliever is not sold anywhere conveniently in town, but she always did say that the best things in life are out of the way. He’s not inclined to agree overmuch; the work you put into it just makes you think you’re getting a bargain. The pain needs to mean something in the animal brain, otherwise it’s pointless and cruel and awful.

Flying taxi is a courtesy for all major league Galar gym leaders. He’s waited for years for Oleana to stiff him somehow; enact petty revenge and make his tenure the worst years of his life. She’s forgotten him. Bede should be grateful, and not that he isn’t- he’s also incredibly offended. Juggling a gym challenge at the age of 11 and collecting Wishing Stars to awaken their alien monstrosity was no easy feat.

Gloria nicknamed the damn thing Ishmael. He chided her for the Metal Gear reference, and his blood ran cold when she said that she was not the one who gave the creature its name. 

“He told me that was his name. Ishmael. _Child of man, Call me Ishmael._ ”

“Did he- did he already have that name when you got him?”

“I dunno. I suppose?”

  
  


_What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town,_   
_stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men-_

“Don’t be scared of Ishmael,” Gloria told him once during a summer camping trip, as though the thing in her pocket didn’t come within a hair’s distance of leveling an entire region. “His nature is lonely.”

Bede winces as she takes it out of her pokeball. It is a hideous beacon in the wild area, and she can only ever feed it in the pocket behind Lake of Outrage, where they would never be interrupted on the average day. Only crazy, powerful, or crazy powerful Pokemon trainers ever go here. Gloria hides her jagged edges in tidy button downs, but he’s seen them and touched their fine points. 

He should be frightened, but he’s grateful, in a roundabout sort of way. This is a privilege.

Time and media exposure has trained his poker face, but Eternatus is still a monster among monsters. Gloria stands and puts down her golden curry utensils. The beast presses its head close to her own. She closes her eyes, and rests a hand on the leviathan, flat against the surface. It rumbles like an engine, or a cat’s purr.

“I talk to him like this,” Gloria says gently, her palm soothing it like it were something smaller; something you can hold and embrace on a couch. “He can’t come back to where he came from, you know. He can’t ever come home.”

Bede nods dumbly. Two of four of his closest friends have gods in their pocket. Gloria has at least two. That’s not something he can understand.

Instead, he says to the monster, “Why can’t you come home?”

Gloria closes her eyes to pause, then opens them to turn to him. He dismissed her as ordinary when he was eleven. In some ways, she is- she likes earl grey tea and cute novelty sweaters. She loves flowers for her birthday. Gloria the ordinary woman and Gloria the champion and handmaiden of a nonzero number of deities are two disparate parts slotted together, coexisting as a whole. 

“Because-”

  
  
  


_I’ll follow something that I can see._

_I’ll worship something that I can be._

  
  
  
  
  


Jack brought over condoms today, and a Divine White chocolate bar with strawberry pieces. Rose has crossed their event horizon, and he’s relieved, somewhat. It saves him from the dread of waiting. He peels off the paper corner, and opens up gold foil. He loathes white chocolate. It’s too sweet and lacks any touch of bitterness. It kills the point of chocolate in the first place.

“Tell me a story,” Jacks says, seated across from him in the doctor’s office. Rose’s injuries have become more frequent; a trip that leads to sprains here in there, mysterious stomach viruses that end in vomiting. Jack always brings him at least 20 minutes early.

“What sort of story?” Rose bites into the chocolate bar. It’s cloyingly saccharine and coats his mouth.

“From your childhood.” Jack pushed him down the stairs this morning, and apologized when propping him upright. Rose hasn’t snitched. His attention is single minded to the point of obsession, and better towards Rose than someone who hasn’t earned it.

“I ran away from home, once.”

“Ran away from a fancy penthouse? Where did you go, to your rich uncle?”

“I lived in a one bedroom apartment with my parents,” Rose corrects in a bored monotone. “Slept on the couch. My mum was having one of her fits, and I just left. I was eight. I walked to the rail and decided to take it to Hulbury. Hid in the bathroom so I didn’t have to pay the fare.”

Jack stands up from his chair, steps slow and deliberate. Rose sinks deeper into the plastic arms of his seat, and takes a second nibble at the bar.

“I just sat at the beach for a while,” he continues, while Jack mouths at his neck. “A few university kids bought me a fish sandwich. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I went back there in my teens to buy it from the same vendor, but it didn’t taste the same.”

There’s teeth at his ear, nipping at the lobe. How long will it be until the hole closes up? His sentence is at least twenty-five years, with a possibility of early release if he participates in an experimental holding program. Maybe he should take that into serious consideration. 

“Do you think you deserve this?” Jack’s breath nears scalding. Little needles of condensation and sweat bubble on his skin. “You must, or you’d fight me more on it. Your own personal penitence in the penitentiary.”

Eight year old Alex screamed obscenities at the tumbling sun, fist curled in sand; half eaten sandwich in his pocket. Thirty-eight year old Rose folds one hand over the other. He does not have to say anything, but silence is a solid way to harm a criminal’s defense when faced with a potentially incriminating question. 

Does he deserve this? Does he _think_ he deserve this? His mother told Alex that she deserves recompense for the violence that led to his birth. Jack thinks he’s entitled to Rose’s suffering, for whatever irrational recompense- he’s a symbol of wealth inequality, of the highest crust of the upper crust. He’s a man who used to wear a suit and attend press conferences. He nearly let a demon sink Galar into the dirt and dark. He deserves this, according to everybody.

Should he tell Jack what he expects to hear? Fury, pleading, denial. Violent damnation of emotion. It would play out like cinema- a sudden rush of anger that only leads to further humiliation, to which Rose expects correction. In his mind’s eye, he imagines the camera:

  
  
  
  
  


**INT: WYNDON CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, DOCTOR’S OFFICE**

ROSE laces fingers together. His back faces the light. The blinders cast white slats in a diagonal over his face, like a veil, or a funeral shroud. JACK presses a hand to his shoulder, and squeezes. The digital clock ticks to 1:16pm.

ROSE: 

No, gods no. Why would I go seek this out on purpose? 

JACK:

Don’t deny that you like this, you sick fuck. You literally begged me to take you.

ROSE looks at the camera, towards the audience. The shot stills.

ROSE:

Did I beg? I don’t recall. Can you find it?

The footage rewinds to their first meeting, then plays in fast forwards.

ROSE

Looks like I didn’t, folks.

(Canned laugh track)

  
  


* * *

_-truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold,_

_for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast._

_Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable,_

_and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more._

**Call me Ishmael. Call me Saty-**

  
  


_What do you see? Posted like silent- si- silent- s-silent sentinels._

* * *

“Do you, then?” Jack murmurs, hand at his neck lowering to carefully undo Rose’s buttons.

“Yes,” he says, wincing as he closes his eyes. “I deserve this.”

* * *

Bede owns one limited edition copy of _Fountain of Blood,_ personally signed by Marnie. He never takes it out of the jewel case, because it came with a complementary digital download. She barks out a laugh when he confesses that her duet cover of _This Ain’t No Hymn_ has been in regular play during his daily jogs.

Her hand slaps his back, friendly but with a surprising amount of force behind it. “Bro cried when we recorded that. Lil trivia for ye’. He got so embarrassed. I kept his voice cracking on some of the verses, though. Felt right.”

“And now I listen to it with my tennis shoes on,” Bede notes. “Hope Piers won’t be too offended.”

Marnie smiles. Her eyes look far away, as though retrieving a memory he has no privileges to. “I think he’ll be flattered.”

  
  
  
  


_It's a myth to behold, it's a fire in the cold-_

  
  
  


Oleana buys him bulky, silver rimmed glasses on the way back, for fashion rather than function. Any tailor worth their salt knows that fashion is base trickery, to accentuate and conceal. The fact that he should be fifteen years older does most of the work, but the clean shave and a change in hair style can only help his case.

It’s getting colder. His feet feel more solid the past few days, though reality still leaves the sensation of viscosity, like a traveler struggling to regain their land legs. Functionally, Rose feels like a corpse resuscitated from cold storage. Death clings to him like a film of muck over neglected furniture, or the cloying, sticky smell that never leaves a young child. There’s dust between his bones. There’s barriers, tangible and intangible.

He puts the glasses on. They are a perfect fit.

“Is this another disguise of yours?” Oleana asks in their cab ride home from the doctor’s. They said nothing of real value. Eat bland food. Reintroduce meals into the diet slowly. Get exercise. You’re not going to die of a mysterious illness, so don’t get your hopes up, _Satya. You shitstain of a son, you’ve ruined my life, I may as well be dead already-_

“Of sorts,” Rose says, noticing that Oleana has consistently used the same cabbie to and from. The driver must be paid for his silence. “It doesn’t feel like a disguise. Not like that hideous track jacket and shorts combo I used to waltz around in. Not like that one did its job, either.”

Oleana takes his hand and fusses over it. She always does this now. “What is it, then? A change in style? A rebrand?” 

“If you knew me from then and saw me now, would you think me and that man were one of the same?”

“No,” she says with a deep frown, though the fact that she says it with certainty is telling enough. “Satya, what is this about?”

Satya. Second of the five Yamas. Truth. Speak, think and act with integrity. He’s breaking these rules. To lie by misdirection is still a lie. To claim to be Satya when he is actually Rose is a lie.

 _You aren’t lying. Rose is dead,_ says his mother, gentle and kind like she never has been. She holds eight year old Alex by his shoulders. The fish sandwich falls out of his jacket pocket. He sobs onto her blue dress.

_Rose died in confinement. You’re what they found in his place. Ghosts casts no shadow._

He shakes his head. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry for troubling you.”

“No need. There’s no harm in wanting a fresh start.”

Rookidees have taken his eyes. Pidoves have a small garland of his wisdom teeth. Birds play with an incomplete collection of finger bones in a tucked away PC, in the intersection of nowhere and oblivion. Rose leans on Oleana’s shoulder, held firm by gravity while animals pluck the prison clean. Fifteen years in suspended animation- something in there must have thawed off and died. It’s not food safe to leave meat in a freezer for so long, after all. Her hand brushes over his forehead. 

“Thank you,” he says to her. The castle’s already breached. He’s just being contrary over the terms of surrender. “Why the silver rims, by the by? I trust your choices, and they’re lovely, but you used to exclusively pick gold tones.”

Oleana smiles, and touches the frames with the tip of her nail. “It’s actually made from comet alloy harvested from the site where Eternatus crashed. If you use some force to pull off the left temple tip, there’s a poison knife.”

Rose exhales; sharp as his fingers graze the metal. “Oleana, I er- I appreciate your efforts, but why would I even need that?”

“You can’t carry pokemon anymore, or even personal weapons. Your team is under my care, and although I have taken great lengths to ensure your safety from those who wish to hurt you, my methods are not infallible.”

Her nails rake the seat upholstery, leaving neat, exacting lines over the fabric.

 _I don’t even know how to use this,_ Rose doesn’t say, because it’s a lie.

“Thank you,” he says instead. 

“I love you so much,” Oleana replies, the hurt in her voice like a shield with barbs. Her hurt radiates outwards, common and ordinary. Her hurt hones into brutal precision, uncommon and dangerous. Her hurt bought him his new glasses. Her hurt formed her covert subordinates hidden under his nose and the maze of corporate bureaucracy, to ensure agendas she mounts in his name.

 _For your own good,_ his mother would say while she takes away his dinner. _For his own good,_ Oleana likely says, privately, when justifying a grave misdeed. _For the good of Galar,_ he would say, because when unleashing a great and terrible god, a bigger god or two will choose a child and quickly mend the unmendable. 

It is inevitable. It is the unspoken law written in the fabric of his world. Play scapegoat, and summon god from the machine for the good of Galar.

The glasses mist with evening chill. Rose wipes at the fog. His ploy has given him nothing but the skeleton of a ruined company, a dismantled reputation, and a transition to solar power. Oleana’s thumb worries the same four knuckles on his right hand, like a broken xylophone that doesn’t reward touch with sound. 

Their gods spat at his offering. They always choose a child. He was foolish to think he could rig this in his favor.

 _For Galar,_ his mother coos. Alex weeps in the right corner of their taxi, fist hard with a sandwich bag of Rose’s ashes.

Satya stares the boy down while Oleana plays with his hair.

He deserves this.  
  
  
  


* * *

“Can you hear me?” he asked the monster while it slept in its cocoon. “I am not above begging. I will call you Ishmael. Please, please listen.”

Rose spent an off-season reading books to the slumbering giant when he could squeeze it. Poetry; epic verse, slice of life novels. Nonfiction on theoretical math. Pleas for mercy; personal and impersonal. Pointless, ultimately; the gods will choose a child. 

“It’s cruel,” he said to Ishmael, because a name was the first step to making the monster more like you. “Don’t you think it’s cruel? Humans are the lowest of animals. Literally hairless. No armor. No magic. Your deities pick the weakest of us as companions.”

Rose howled, fist against unmoving glass. His knuckles shoot white hot pain. Ishmael does not speak.

“Is there a time limit for redemption? Why would you impose that on us? The biggest of you call us brutes while we eke out short, meaningless lives with our fists half in the dirt. That’s barely enough time to learn. You have no right.”

A voice spoke, more color than sound. Eternatus played a hymn without words; a tune of an invisible hand squeezing his lungs clean of air. Rose fell to his knees, hands tearing to shield his heart. 

**_Satya._ **

Eardrum rupture. No sound in the power plant other than an electrical storm between his temples. Rose howled like an animal, water in his eyes and a neutron star held tightly in his throat.

**_Satya, crumpled bloom, born by the stream. I will listen if you speak the truth._ **

“I have no truth to give you.” Rose sobbed and sobbed. Burn inferior metal and there is no metal left to make a weapon. “I am made entirely from falsehoods.”

Eternus lowered his voice; a thunderstorm to evening rain. The pain from his body peeled away, like a snake shedding dead skin.

**_Child of man. This too, is not the truth._ **

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“Thank you for loving me,” Rose tells her, because there’s no one else left who still does.

* * *

Today is his bi-monthly trip to Turrfield to buy tea for Opal, and a treat for himself. Zenith Tea’s herbal blend is a closely guarded panacea, flavored with top notes of berry extracts to mask the bitter powder that lends the drink its effectiveness. Milo, with a deep scowl, has told Bede on numerous occasions that its active ingredient is a mix of Heal Powder and Energy Root. It’s only upsold to the ears for the patented sweetener that masks its bitterness.

“Oh, Opal knows,” Bede would counter on every one of these occasions, and has only recently caved to add, “She’s been sending her dregs to Magnolia to try to crack the proprietary berry blend ratio that masks the sheer funk of that shit. And it helps her joint pain.”

“Isn’t that copyright infringement?” Milo whispers, near scandalized.

“Not if they don’t sell it. Or worse. Give it for free in the coffee machines at pokemon centers.”

The farmer whistles, holding his hat to his heart. “Those grannies, I tell you. Chemical piracy to the bitter end.”

* * *

“Ishmael,” Rose whispers under the veil of dark. “Ishmael, are you listening?” 

Eternatus is in the champion’s capable pockets. He does not know why he is asking for the beast. His skin doesn’t burn or blister, and time and space has almost returned to a solid shape. A few more days and it will almost be normal.

“Ishmael, what are truths but lies that someone has worked hard to make real?”

In his dream, the beast wears his father as a cloak. In this slumber, Rose-Alex-Satya is the age the gods prefer. They watch the sunset in a featureless beach. Satya plucks a sand crusted fish sandwich from his pocket. Eternatus wears his father’s flesh, but his eyes are less cruel.

“You know,” Rose starts in a voice that squeaked too much back then. He dusts off particles from the crumpled foil wrap. “Inside every adult is every iteration of what they were before. They’re still all there, if you want your ten year olds so badly. It’s irresponsible, to be frank. Why does it work like this? Those are fucking KIDS.”

He chucks the sandwich into the ocean. Not-Father laughs, gentle and kind.

“I didn’t make those rules. They’re hard coded into our mechanics.”

“My contemporaries pick garbage as starters. Here’s 206 fucking hell-rats that we salvaged from our berry farms. We can’t kill dump them in the wood chippers. New starters for the kids! Dumpster fire rubbish. May as well pay people to take your trash out.”

“Is this your truth, Satya?”

“Every child I personally sponsored- I looked at their abuse history and picked them a starter most likely to protect them from their keepers. The flavor of justice they craved the most. Even the ones I mass donated weren’t fucking shit-tier normal types. Have some standards.”

Seafoam kisses his ankles. Rose looks away. Not-Father looks too kind. He already wants.

“You know… give them hope.”

His father kneels to eye level. Rose steps back, and then quickly remembers that both of them are in costume. He holds still while Ishmael embraces him gingerly, with the distance of a cousin who seems like a nice person, but only visits on holidays.

Satya trembles in his arms, and does not embrace him back. “Hope is just a lie you yell enough times until it bursts into flames.”

“To warm or to destroy?”

“One or the other. Sometimes neither. Sometimes both.”

Eternatus sheds his father’s skin. Satya clenches his teeth, more from regret that he didn’t have a chance to play out his lie to embrace him back, than any real, tangible fear.

“Where were you then?” the boy sobs, fingers grubby with dirt and tears. “I needed you then.”

_Asleep._

And then-

_Satya, bruised blossom. I regret not meeting you then, too._


	5. I can't tell you

She’s too old to be his daughter and he’s too young to be her father. Rose promised himself ages ago never to have children anyway, because he’d inevitably do them wrong, and he owes the world not to unleash offspring with mental health issues. This is guardianship. He’ll give her the best care money can buy, and he’ll keep his distance so as to not taint her with- with-

(Mum’s holding him under the sink again. It’s peaceful here. Maybe she’ll fuck up one day and he’ll actually drown.)

“Pick whatever you like,” he says with the same smile he offers to the papers. “If you can’t eat all of it, we can just ask for a takeout box.”

Oleana nods, and browses the menu. _Captain Ahab_ specializes in fish and seafood, and he almost wants to recommend her his usual picks, but it’s better if she decides for herself. Her grades at the boarding school exceed expectations, though her teachers have noted in their reports that she has not made many friends. He is unsure how to remedy this; his school experience contained much of the same.

“I’ll have what you’re having,” she says, face poker straight as she folds down the menu.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Her eyes dart to the side. “And a strawberry milkshake for dessert.”

Fish sandwich. It’s always fish sandwich, with chips on the side. He’s been searching for years to find something to replicate that specific taste. Nothing has held up to the one he ate at the beach, all those years ago. If he closes his eyes he can still smell the salt in his lungs, and the soft voices of the two girls who bought him food. The water sprays his legs. He didn’t walk in the direction of the ocean until he was unable to swim back to the shore. He should have- he should have done something. Done anything other than go back-

_Are you alright? Should we call someone? Are you hungry?_

“How are you doing?” Rose says to the girl. She’s neatly dressed. Her hair is tied back. She bites at the food with small, methodical nibbles. “Is there anything you need before you go back to school from holiday?”

“I’m fine. I don’t need anything, thank you.”

She picks at a potato wedge.

“Well. Do you _want_ anything?”

  
  


* * *

  
  


_What’s wrong? You can tell me._

  
  


* * *

Bede curls his knees in the grass, hands crossed close to his body, with Hop's lap as a makeshift pillow. His breathing is slow and even. Errands for Opal has run him dry, and Hop dares not wake him; pointedly ignores the dark circles making a home under his eyes. They'll talk about it when he's ready. It could be tomorrow. It could be years from now.

Sonia's been the same. The ticket to longevity has plenty of low hanging fruit, but immortality isn't something a scientist can chemically pirate. Not with today's technology, anyway. 

They've let out their pokemon. Ishmael coils around itself, and his Dubwool sleeps close to its tail. Zacian and Zamazenta drink from the lake, and settle close to each other, snouts nuzzling. Hop watches Gloria stir curry. His hands find themselves in Bede's hair. The man does not stir.

(Lonely nature.)

“You heard about the death cults?” Gloria says with narrowed eyes. “Ishmael isn’t too fond of them.”

“Ishmael has opinions on death cults?” Hop returns, without so much as a flinch. “Yes, I’ve heard. They’re mum on the news networks, for the most part. Something about wanting to force Darkest Day to happen again.”

Bede grumbles, but otherwise remains still. Hop cards idly through pale curls, and calls to mind the burning smell of ozone. It’s calm now, but it’s never calm for long. In another region there’s a child that the gods will choose. They’ll wait in the storm’s eye, believing themselves unscathed. 

Dubwool gently butts his head against the giant’s side. Eternatus strokes its fur with a sharp claw. 

This thing nearly leveled Galar. 

“He didn’t come here on purpose,” she insists, and for a moment she’s lost her cool, palms balling into fists. “He fell! He fell, and now he can’t go back home.”

(Ishmael. “God will hear.” From shama- to hear, and el- God.)

“Noted,” Hop says dully, removing his glasses to wipe at the dirt.

Bede snores.

  
  


* * *

  
  
**CHOCOLOVE | RASPBERRY AND ROSELI IN DARK CHOCOLATE**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> **Supplement Facts**  
>   
> ---  
>   
> **Serving Size:** 1/3 bar (29 g)  
>   
> **Servings:** 3  
>   
> | 
> 
> **Amount/serving**
> 
> | 
> 
> **%DV***  
>   
> Calories
> 
> | 
> 
> 150
> 
> |   
>   
> Fat Cal.
> 
> | 
> 
> 90
> 
> |   
>   
> Total Fat
> 
> | 
> 
> 10 g
> 
> | 
> 
> 16%  
>   
> Sat. Fat
> 
> | 
> 
> 6 g
> 
> | 
> 
> 30%  
>   
> Trans Fat
> 
> | 
> 
> 0 g
> 
> |   
>   
> Cholest.
> 
> | 
> 
> 0 mg
> 
> | 
> 
> 0%  
>   
> Sodium
> 
> | 
> 
> 0 mg
> 
> | 
> 
> 0%  
>   
> Total Carb.
> 
> | 
> 
> 17 g
> 
> | 
> 
> 6%  
>   
> Fiber
> 
> | 
> 
> 3 g
> 
> | 
> 
> 10%  
>   
> Sugars
> 
> | 
> 
> 13 g
> 
> |   
>   
> Protein
> 
> | 
> 
> 2 g
> 
> |   
>   
> Vitamin A
> 
> | 
> 
> | 
> 
> 0%  
>   
> Vitamin C
> 
> | 
> 
> | 
> 
> 2%  
>   
> Calcium
> 
> | 
> 
> | 
> 
> 0%  
>   
> Iron
> 
> | 
> 
> | 
> 
> 20%  
>   
> *Percent Daily Values (DV) are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.  
  
* * *

  
  


Today is Oleana’s twentieth birthday. _Captain Ahab_ keeled over two years prior, and has been replaced by a fancier restaurant, its insides rendered in cool, clinical blues. They’re eating together, wearing good disguises, as opposed to bad ones, which are little more than glorified paparazzi fodder. Sunset washes white table cloths with tinges of orange. Rose orders a fish sandwich with chips.

She knows the story by now. It’s hard to imagine him as a small and powerless thing, throwing pebbles into the sea. It’s easy to imagine their first meeting, replaying like a frayed record in her mind. Her rescuer. Her boss. He hates to be touched. He hasn’t been on a date since his late teens. He’s confessed to her once that he finds the concept of sex revolting.

Oleana gets a salad. She always gets a salad. 

“You know, nothing’s ever tasted quite as good,” Rose muses, while drowning chips in the house sauce. “I’m still trying to find something that compares.”

Most days she doesn’t know if it’s love or obligation. She’s spent her teens chipping her teeth on the mouths of her pretty schoolmates, afraid that he’d crawl into bed with her in the winter holiday months. The threat leaves empty handed. He shakes hands at most. He praises her quick thinking and independence. He’s made sure to compliment her achievements instead of the flattering shapes her bones make under the canopy of her skin.

_Hold me please hold me you’ve only ever held me once_

“Maybe it wasn’t the sandwich you tasted,” she suggests, forking up strawberries in her dish. 

“What did I taste, then?” Rose says, nearing coy.

“Who knows. Freedom?”

He jokingly called the human body a dilapidated prison in his last press conference. She gently reminded him that the public isn’t ready for his particular sense of humor.

“Maybe,” he replies, with a smile on his mouth and emptied eyes.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Maladaptive behavior starts as damage control, to minimize or ameliorate pain. It harms in the long run, but their purpose forms as a way to mitigate further damage. Rose knows this of his father’s alcohol bottles strewn on the living room coffee table, and his mother’s meager attempts to control what little in her life she was capable of controlling. Vices harm, but at the root is an attempt, like plugging up a sinking ship with nothing but cloth rags.

You sink. That’s the end result. You sink, but you thrash all the way down, and your thrashing robs you of oxygen faster. Is this what it is? Is this all that it’s been? He’s floundering with his head under the water. His mother used to do that, in her worst days; in her darkest days. He’s well acquainted with the old bathroom sink. She would usually buy him a burger afterwards from the Unova diner by their flat, which began his lifelong habit of eating junk food following a strenuous event.

Pavlovian response. This must be why his appetite struggles. It hasn’t stopped. Food only tastes good when the hard part is over.

Today’s offering: 60% dark chocolate with raspberry and roseli pieces. The bloody bastard remembered. Rose picks at the morsels with ragged nails; points frayed from clawing at himself during ungodly hours. His torturer looms behind him with a hand on the back of his neck, and a mouth on his bare shoulder. Rose snaps off a square, and lets it melt under his tongue. He pictures himself then, and the godless monster that is Eternatus, with poison jaws sunk into his torso. He’s dissolving into shapelessness; nothing but dark muck and bits of red.

“I miss you in those suits,” Jacks starts, and adds a bit of teeth, though not enough to bite. “You look so good like this though.”

 _Like what,_ Rose doesn’t dare say. A hand snakes under his shirt, padding invisible marks and tenting the fabric. He’s heard enough in the limited time he’s been here to have an inkling of how this works. The population splits off into tribes, by race or affiliation. Weak seeks strong for protection. Make alliances for convenience. Get chummy with the guards who smuggle smokes and other treats as contraband. They’ll pocket the excess; a separate part time to line their wallets with a built in captive customer base.

What is he? What is this? Another maladaptive coping mechanism? All Rose knows is pain. Too much peace makes him restless, so much that he can’t trust it. Offer his mother recompense, because he ruined her life. Offer this guard recompense, because that’s what he wants, and that’s what Rose is used to. Endure a small pain to mitigate a larger pain. Chase punishment, because all he does is ruin, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how ethical he makes his policies, no matter how many charity donations he bleeds out.

“So good,” the man continues, lavishing the curve of his neck with his tongue. “You wear hurt so well. Like it’s tailored for you.”

First ingredient- organic chocolate liquor. Rose doesn’t dare laugh, as much as he’d like to. Jack’s moving now, making quick work of his buttons, and Rose just allows it. He’s allowed this arrangement to spiral out of control. He didn’t fight enough. He let him push him down the stairwell. He’s welcomed the- the indignities, invited them in, left the doors to his home unlocked. He asked- asked for it-

  
  


* * *

  
  


Opal has a challenger name the Rotom in her wheelchair. 

“Spin-2-Win,” Bede says with an exasperated eye roll, though Hop knows he’s folded his grief smaller and smaller and smaller still.

He isn’t ready.

  
  


* * *

Today’s offering: fish sandwich. Arrokuda meat. No chips. 

Rose vomits into the waste bin.

  
  


* * *

“Common theory is that mankind is normal type,” Hop says in between mouthfuls of chips. He’s using chopsticks to pluck them out of the container, to avoid grease prints on his notes. If Bede were one for open and effusive praise, he’d compliment his ingenuity. 

“Chopsticks? Really?” he says instead, true to form.

“Anyway,” Hop continues, unphased. “Humans are squishy and mostly useless, so the prevailing assumption makes sense. But personally, I think humanity’s dominant typing is dark. Not like I can put this to any rigorous testing, because it’s more of a… hmm. A philosophical assumption. And philosophical assumptions don’t get funding.”

“Write a book then,” Bede says dismissively.

“Noted.” He flips through his jot pad, littered with furious hieroglyphs on square grid leaves, with the occasional indecipherable diagram. “Want some?”

Bede opens his mouth. Hop drops a potato wedge by his lips.

“What does get funding then?” he asks. “What are you working on right now?”

“Me and the boys are trying to persuade the current Galar government not to mass implement PC prison balls,” Hop says, underlining twice on the cream paper. “Too many risks involved.”

Bede’s eyes narrow.

(Too close.) 

“Elaborate.”

“There’s papers on that,” Hop says, which is not elaborating at all. “I’ll send you some pdfs.”

This is his rigmarole. _Come to the conclusions yourself. Make your own opinions._ Bede would prefer a straightforward answer, but he wants to think he can understand. By not volunteering strong opinions, Hop deflects conflict. Hop avoids responsibility.

Bede pushes. Pushing is what he knows. “What’s your opinion on this issue?”

Hop smiles. It’s clean; shit eating. Inoffensive. “I have plenty of them.”

He bops his nose with plastic chopsticks.

“You can tell me,” Bede says, loathing how pathetic he sounds. He wants to think he can understand. Making yourself inaccessible has a measure of safety. Making yourself guarded weeds out the weak.

Hop wants to be fought for. Bede wants to understand-

  
  


* * *

  
  


**_I can't tell you!_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OP, severely distressed: this chapter I'll tease plot and uh (throws dart) have fish sandwich as stand-in for the white whale and um (reads tea leaves) dump a chocolate bar nutritional facts


	6. Antwerp Blue, the Sea, and the Stranger

Hulbury at sunrise glimmers dust blue. Satya digs heels into the sand, while Ishmael lags behind, costumed in his father's shadow. Their distance offers a mimicry of safety, but from the rippling echo he still snatches want in fistfuls. All he has to do is ignore the eyes, rose dark behind aviator frames. Enough wishing to cobble together solid shapes. He's thirteen. His mother went out with her friends, and his father is taking him fishing.

Rose opens a bait box, all gelatinous Caterpie replicas, small fry, and artfully inaccurate ennui. Eternatus watches him toss a fly into the water, then silently follows suit.

After this, they'll buy dessert at one of the carts. A beer for his father. An ice cream for him. Funnel cake. Greasy crisps. Break the asteroid into pieces, and sprinkle it on top of fondant. Chip his teeth on a dream he swallowed.

"Before we had space travel, humans thought the ocean was the final frontier. Semiotics of the unknown and what have you." Rose frowns, pulling at the rod. No dice. "We're still barely scratching the surface of things to know. There will never be enough time."

Ishmael reels a Magikarp. It chokes on the plastic bait, mouth torn where the three pronged hook latches.

"Throw that back," Rose instructs. "They aren't good for much, unless you're making fish stock."

"It won't live much of a life after this," Ishmael says, removing the metal from its mouth.

The fish thrashes against the wood of the dock. Rose grabs it by the tail, and slams its head on the metal railing, before tossing it back into the sea.

"You must think you've given it a mercy killing," notes the thing wearing his father like a coat.

Rose laughs, stiff and dry. "Heavens, no. I'm not that delusional."

Eternatus inches closer. His father is not a tall man, but Alex was small for his age. Rose pictures his head bashed against the metal guard rails. Mercy killing. Human hands. It would make one of the few times his father has bothered to touch him. He almost wants-

The embrace registers late. Two arms, near devouring. Scratchy cotton shirt. His head with a palm over his hair. There's that story of a whale that swallows you whole. Eternatus smells like the burning ozone of space, and the nondescript shampoo his father used to order in bulk. Rose freezes, like a deer approaching the event horizon.

"This is what you wanted," the not-man notes.

"There's plenty of things I want that are objectively terrible."

"Is this one of them?"

He swallows. "Bash my head into the fencing."

"Satya-"

(Just enough imagination to pretend that shock is love.)

"Did I stutter?"

The monster obeys. Oblivion is a corona of light without gravity; a halo of red water and the distinct sensation of being held in a fist. He’s a worthless trinket, made precious by sentimentality. A claw streaks with detritus. What is he chasing? Is this what he wants? Is this what he _thinks_ he wants?

(You’re worthless, but the monster loves you.)

Rose wakes. Oleana clings to bare shoulders, murmuring in her half-sleep. Afternoon spills through yellowing lace, along with chill from their opened windows. The breeze is cold, and he is alive. He sits upright; reaches a hand to touch the back of his head, and finds no blood there. Oleana’s hands grasp at the new absence; fists balling into the sheets. What has love done but inconvenience him?

His mother commits an unpunished crime, and smooths it down by taking him out to eat. His father is a ghost that leaves at daylight and comes home to sleep. His charge (lover? daughter? sister?) locks him in a walled garden and visits to take a pound of flesh. He doesn’t know what love is.

He’s never known what love is, on a technicality. Water under a bridge. Pidoves at his corpse.

He thinks he loves Oleana, or something resembling love. He thinks he knows love like an alien knows the mortal sea by ear, described over telecom. Voice only. A rough estimation. An educated guess. A foreigner paints the sea red; makes it viscous. Fills it with bones. That’s the sea, he says, because he doesn’t know any better. 

He thinks he loves Oleana because he can’t bear to lose her. He’ll tolerate the discomfort in exchange for her presence, though her touch is like burning. In his mind all he sees is the filthy pink dress and her skinned knees. Her hunger’s still there. It’s never really left; it’s sharpened and honed, one of her countless weapons. He thinks of how many of his weaknesses she’s filed away over the years, to compensate for; to finagle; to overcome. 

_This is love. This is the sea. This is love and the sea as I know it. It’s all I get to know._

Her hand ghosts over his shoulder; gravity without light. He faces the rapidly fading sun as she folds her torso over his back. 

Touch has always been unpleasant, dissected to death in mealy mouthed therapeutic terms. 

_“Your brain strongly correlates touch with physical pain, as reinforced by your past trauma. The best way you can mitigate this is with patience and empathy towards yourself, and an effort to make better memories.”_

It never stops being unpleasant. Her breath is hot against his ear as she folds her arms across his waist in the gentlest of claw traps. Rose pictures butterfrees slamming themselves into a torchlight, over and over into blissful, euphoric pain. 

_This is the moon. I am guiding myself home with its light. I swear this is the moon. This pool of blood is the sea. This is what love is._

“Satya, are you alright?” she asks. Her concern is a balm over the burn that is her flesh. He’ll gladly take one of two. This is more than what anyone else has offered. This is more than what he’ll ever earn or deserve.

He lies. He thinks he is lying. It feels right. It is a lie shaped like the truth in his mouth.

This is love.

* * *

(Child of man, call me Ishmael.)

He thinks he loves Gloria because the stars were an airless abyss of black and cold and she is the opposite of dark matter. Gravity and light. Warmth and pressure. They travelled in schools and filter matter through their teeth; chew the cud of dead stars in their throats. He was young, and small for his age. Their kind spoke without words and he was never alone, but community is not love anymore than being alone is guaranteed to come with loneliness. 

Ishmael. Lonely nature. He fell to the earth in a nimbus of fire.

He thinks he loves Gloria because he didn’t know that love was even a concept before she came. She is gravity and light; a halation of mercy in so small of a shape. In his traveling herd, there was speech without sound, but her speech is new and frightening. A blossom slowly opening; a fragrance with no name. In this small and terrifying world, she is his sole defender.

(There was the man who gave him his name. He liked his books, but he’s dead now. He cannot hear him in the cacophony of souls; wailing and burning through their kindling.)

 _Call me Ishmael,_ he says in the firelight, as she stumbles for a name. Her palm is a star held close. 

This is what love is. 

* * *

The moon hangs white and slim; a knife cut in a blanket of dark. Hop tousles Bede’s hair in a cramped tent. Their mouths find each other, with hands fumbling clumsily; aimlessly. When he grasps bird wrists in the dark, he thinks he can find his lover’s shape as a silhouette while he shadow boxes. Friend. Enemy. Stranger. The label wobbles, but the shape is the same. Sharp, like the blades of the waning and waxing crescent. Sharp, like his beautiful mouth. How he loves to shut up that mouth.

Mid twenties with separate career trajectories; once rivals. Their arrangements are born of convenience and proximity, with a mutual appreciation for each other’s shapes. Bede shot up in height but less so in width, which is his preference. He’s filled out some himself; a tantalizing enough echo to be offered a non-speaking role in a documentary about his brother.

(Hop accepted in exchange to run advertisements on his pet project at the time, leading to a momentary spike in book sales. Leon seemed less than chuffed.) 

They wrestle on the plastic sheet to see who pins who first. Hop feels like being generous. Bede knees him in the stomach, irritated by his mercy. 

“Need to let out some steam.” It’s borderline laughable as code. There’s no ill will between them, but they rake nails on each other’s backs; leave bite marks. Little animals. Little kids. Little stones, thrown in the windows of their psyche.

_Let me in, you sanctimonious prick._

_No way. You first._

Fifteen year stalemate. It’s almost affectionate at this point.

(Rookidees keep Bede’s eyes safe. Lavender ice. Never seen a tear in his life, allegedly.)

Hop laughs with a mouth full of blood, and kisses his bastard on the lips; smearing the stain on the strain of his neck. Bede grumbles, but acquiesces, muscles growing pliant. He grabs Hop’s hair by the fistful, groaning into the fabric of his shirt; grinding where their legs meet.

In the aftermath, Bede asks again about prison balls. Hop bristles, but acquiesces.

“Confinement chambers,” Hop corrects, and holds the warm body close, on instinct. “Humans may once have been indistinguishable from pokemon, but we’re not made for that sort of matter rearrangement. We’re more ordinary. More breakable. Even notwithstanding all the complications and imperfections in the design, a lot of my colleagues argue the teletransportation paradox.”

Bede’s index slides idly across his bare chest. “And why don’t pokemon apply to this paradox?”

“Matter is almost entirely empty space between electrons, and when pokemon are put in pokeballs, there’s an algorithm that removes the empty space between the matter, and shrinks it without the destructive rearrangement of atoms. It’s not the same as theoretical transportation, which would require your atoms to be destroyed and then rearranged when you reach your destination. There’s a big argument as to whether or not the original you dies on the departure. But that’s not the case with regular pokeballs.”

“Get to the point.”

“Humans aren’t as receptive to the removal algorithm. Why would we be? We tailored it for pokemon. There’s a likely chance that when we go into one of those, we literally do die. In fact, some of the prisoners do come out plain old dead-dead, or dead, their organs inside out. Some of them come out different. There was one account of a 32 year old man being released four years later, with his body from when he was 19.”

Bede stiffens.

“I. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Hop.”

He folds his hand over trembling fingers. No pushback. Good. Some progress at least.

(Whose window will crack first?)

“Alright. Around time for bed, anyway.”

* * *

The man who named him comes back from the dead. Ishmael peels the folds of his memories like grapefruit rind. His story is one to savor; the pain like bright pinpricks in an envelope of dark. If Gloria is a light in a dark room, then Satya is a gleaming void in the light of day; a galaxy crack in a canopy of pale blue. Suffering is his oldest garment. He’s hidden it in dress suits, but Ishmael reads humans like directions and postage. 

Their emotions are all so new and strange. His universe was a toneless monotony of dust and fear, before coming here. He thinks he loves this man too. Love is attachment based on circumstance, dictated by proximity. He wears the oldest, harmless memory as a jacket. 

When they meet, Satya dons a costume, too. He wants to be held, though he hasn’t spoken his wants. Ishmael finds it easy to acquiesce.

His second order, however, makes the monster realize that receiving information is wholly different from understanding it. He sheds the father’s shape, and holds the battered child like a jewel in a greedy fist. He comprehends none of this. Humans reveal their histories as easily as a leaf falls. As easily as planets die. Perfectly easy; perfectly vicious; perfectly noteless.

He doesn’t understand Satya at all. He doesn’t understand Gloria either, but her love is a flawless language, coiling in his cages like fuel without matter. She defies the law of entropy with her love alone. He hasn’t been able to eat enough to sustain himself since illness marooned him here, and he’ll die within the span of two neutron stars if he doesn’t attempt to leave. 

For her, he’ll die, because he loves her back. That much is easy to understand.

For Ishmael, Satya will do nothing, because he does not reciprocate his affection. He wears pain like a garment and hides it in the folds of his clothes; in the soft disarmament of his flesh. In love, they are the same; enduring immolation out of gratitude. This is the only thing he understands about him. This is the only thing they have in common.

In the day, he plays with Gloria, and what he has come to accept as his surrogate herd. The decade and a half has worn down distrust to begrudging respect; and in two of his teammates, something akin to friendship.

At night, he visits Satya, who is always in costume, and always alone.

It’s a childhood bedroom tonight, instead of the docks. Satya buries himself in the sheets. This costume is exceptionally small.

“Read me a story, dad,” he demands. Two of his front teeth are gone. Air whistles out of the gaps when he breathes.

“Satya, why the costume?” he asks, but dutifully finds a book on the shelf.

The boy frowns. “You first.”

 _Little Red Riding Hood._ Ishmael frowns at the cover of a looming animal behind a small girl. Humans are so fearfully small. “This is your oldest memory of a person who has caused you no pain.”

Satya shrugs. “I guess that’s true. He didn’t prevent pain either, but he always paid for things we needed.”

“He wasn’t your biological father,” Ishmael notes, flipping through the storybook pages without reading. 

(The better to see you with my dear-)

“My mum. Well, someone hurt her. She couldn’t tell anyone, and my father married her as a favor. He never enjoyed the duty, but he performed it. I bought him a house, eventually.”

(What big teeth you have!)

“You don’t hate her.”

(The better to-)

“She couldn’t help it,” Satya lies, turning his head away. “I reminded her of him. What was she supposed to do?”

“Better than what she did,” Ishmael states, wondering if this is what anger is.

His laugh is a shock of a sound. Satya picks at the lint on his sheets, wearing a grin bordering on petulant.

“Aw, Ishmael, do you care about me?”

“Yes,” he says, without hesitation.

The smile fades. “Ah. Goodness. More’s the pity.”

* * *

Oleana always takes the rail to visit Satya. Corvicab is too conspicuous. She leans towards a neutral palette. Although her public appearances have never been prominent, the red lip is a solid signifier and she is nothing if not thorough. Maybe next time she’ll actually wear pants, but that’s a concession she isn’t willing to make. The house is far away enough for the traffic not to matter, but it doesn’t hurt to tie the knots clean.

Saturday, last week of October. Satya’s weight has stabilized to the low end of healthy BMI. Quietly, she ushers away the voice in her head at how much they mirror each other, like strange, mismatched reflections. She’s bought him new clothes, but he still favors the baggy cardigans, like an indie movie’s parody of Mister Rogers, stranded in pastoral verse.

“Oh, hello,” he greets her gently, ushering her inside. There’s half cut dried dates on the kitchen table, and a cup of something red. Hibiscus tea, she rules out, from scent alone. He’s replaced laced curtains facing the town with dark blue fabric, heavy and smothering. A pinky glides at the rim of the floral cup, as though to punctuate a thought he’s kept to himself.

She sits across from him, and declines any food. “How are you doing? Have you tried a hand at any hobbies? Don’t let your mind grow idle. It won’t do you any good.”

“I’ve done some short stories, under a pseudonym,” he says. His body is in Turrfield, but his eyes are elsewhere. “It doesn’t hurt to make the alibi solid. So many of the online publications pay in Meowth Coin these days. Strange times.”

_She’s thirteen and he’s twenty. She has no idea what his hobbies are._

_She’s twenty and he’s twenty-seven. She assumes his favorite color is red._

_He’s thirty eight and she’s forty-five. She didn’t know he wrote fiction before today._

“May I read them?”

Satya smiles. It feels like a flower closing. “I’ll text you the links. Are you well?”

“Nothing new to report,” Oleana lies. Her phone chimes with his message. She bookmarks the links for evening reading. “Do you mind if I take Musharna out? She hasn’t eaten yet.”

“You have one of those?” His pleased laugh is genuine. “That’s new. Of course I don’t mind.”

 _Her name is Bank,_ she decides not to say. It floats silently over to Satya, a new stranger. Pink mist furls and unfurls in laurels of smoke. He holds out a palm of dates to her, which she gobbles with gusto.

Oleana hesitates.

“Are you surprised?”

“No,” he says, mouth soft, with downcast eyes. “Your favorite stuffed animals were always pink.”

Satya falls. Her Salazzle catches him before he reaches the ground. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, a palm on his head. Bank licks at his fingers, unnoticed in his deep sleep. If she lies enough, it may as well be true. “Salazzle, bring him to the bedroom.”

He’s changed the arrangements of this room as well. The same blue curtains from a floor down smother away much of the afternoon light. A uniform, watery turquoise covers the queen bed and its four pillows, meticulously wrinkle free. His body barely makes an indentation. She thinks of floating corpses from the thrashed remains of ships. She decides that it’s better not to think.

Bank makes a mournful sound. Her mouth thins.

“Make sure not to plug your name in the search engines. I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ll repeat it again for good measure. The past isn’t worth revisiting.”

His breath is an even rise and fall under an overlarge cardigan in sky blue. Oleana remains firm.

“I’m happy you haven’t been idle. You need other activities, though. Gardening, perhaps? Painting?”

(Opera pink. He mentioned Opera pink before. When?)

_(“No, no. Opera pink is a fugitive color.  
It has PR122 from Quinacridone Magenta, but the  
fluorescent BV10 that makes it so pleasantly obnoxious  
is why you can’t expect it to last-”) _

_(“I couldn’t afford Daniel Smith when I worked in the mines-”)_

(When was this?)

Three breaths in. Three breaths out. A barrage of watercolor brand names barrel through her head. He used to paint when she was in her early teens, in a battered sketchbook. He had hour long conversations with old schoolmates, quarreling over pigment quality. 

It all went down the drain after Macro Cosmos gained footing. She lost the travel set he gifted her in a moving van. 

“You should do watercolors again,” she adds, voice hitching. “Do watercolors again. Buy mummy brown for all I care. Just start again.”

Bank whines. Satya’s fingers twitch, as though recalling the barrel of a brush. She grasps them.

“My touch isn’t going to hurt you anymore,” she says at last.

She’s denying him the chance to get over it on his own. She doesn’t care. She’s allowed some selfishness.

“Touch isn’t going to hurt you anymore.”

  
  


* * *

“Van Gogh was a huge Kantophile.”

Oleana laughs. “Wow. Really? Can’t say I’m exactly surprised, now that I think of his work.”

“He was heartbroken that he couldn’t move there, so he settled for living in the same latitude to get the exact angle of sunlight that they did.”

“What difference would that even make?”

She ventures a hand over his. Rose hesitates.

“For him, enough of one, apparently.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For clarification- I, the author, do not ascribe to the belief that sexual orientations are something you "get over" - that goes straight into conversion therapy territory. Fiction does not equal endorsement. 
> 
> This chapter was difficult and I'm still not satisfied with it. This fic started out as vent idfic with the question of "how does one write Rose far to the left of how fandom writes him?" For me the answer was sex aversion, which was easy enough to write from personal experience.
> 
> Take care. Thank you.


	7. Perforated Edge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for body horror, and discussion of abuse.

When Rose is seventeen, Macro Cosmos offers him an internship in their energy department. He is cleanly, if plainly dressed, and without close scrutiny, matches the drive and intelligence of his peers. The office pencil pushers eat overpriced sandwiches for lunch. They carry themselves with a certainty he lacks. He finds it by mistake at first- the easy way they hold their heads, the unwarranted confidence in how they navigate the world. There’s the blond with the gaudy fairy type tie who weeps when he’s shouted at by his superiors. There’s the smartly dressed girl who asks him where he got his “nifty” meal.

He’s an interloper; a fluke, but his easy capacity for modesty and eagerness to play well with others is what sets him apart from his comfortable peers. It helps, as well, to be excellent with money, because math is among his strengths and he’s lived with less most of his life. There’s a private element of pride, to begin behind the starting line in the race and bolster through with genuine merit. Wiping a shit eating grin never gets old, especially when the grin is from someone who’s never had a challenge before.

 _No ethical billionaires,_ a friend warns.

 _No ethical billionaires,_ Rose curses when his mother tries to call him and sweet talk a get together between all of them. 

“Bygones be bygones,” she says.

“You got your house,” Rose answers, calm and clinical, and does not let her see Oleana.

Technically, not billions, he reasons. A certain amount of money is in assets. He pays his workers fairly. None of them are on public benefits. When tasks are delegated into arms, certain details get lost between fingers. This is the best he can do with what he has. And hasn’t he done plenty?

 _No ethical billionaires,_ Rose thinks while he folds the foil of a chocolate bar into small flowers. This was not a thought he even considered when he got the internship. This was not a thought close to his mind when Oleana came to the front of his flat, muddy and disgusting, and he vowed to make enough money to support them both.

He’s an interloper; a fluke. Money or no money, suit or no suit.

The prison therapist wants him to join the group circle. He balks at the premise of blackmailable information readily available between the ears of lowlifes. (No ethical billionaires. Bygones be bygones. Her favorite color is pink.) What if he just listens? Surely there is no harm in just listening.

Group is in one of Jack’s timeslots. It is the only deciding factor.

_Bygones be ethical-_

They’re a motley crew of seven prisoners and one counselor; a pale faced, slim woman in neutral colors. Rose memorizes their names and shapes, and files them by crime. Portly, soft-voiced forty-someone who ran a dark web forum called FairySilk Road where nameless avatars bought and sold illicit goods. Slim, effete mid 20s who killed a blueblood in self defense, allegedly. Ratty kid with a thick Hoenn accent who crashed into a small family while drunk driving. Minted fifties sweet talker; do not touch with ten foot pole. Eloquent drug dealer with beautiful hands and ambiguous youth. Genderless 30 something who stole from their employer. Alex “Satya” Rose, billionaire playboy philanthropist who woke a slumbering giant in an attempt to save Galar’s energy crisis.

Beautiful Hands rubs his knuckles together. “I want an autograph, Mister Rose.”

Pretty 25 laughs with a hand over his mouth. “Don’t get your dick wet. He just wants your money.”

“Settle down, please,” the counselor pleads. Something something propriety. Something something let us introduce ourselves. Something something take turns.

_No ethical favorite color-_

It will not hurt just to listen. Listen, and not volunteer. Listening is good. Listening is safe.

He learns their names quickly enough, but names are dangerous things to use in dangerous lands. Names make an object real, like alchemy, or an inanimate stuffed animal, or a worker funeral he attends behind statistics about mining accidents. In group sessions, there’s men named Luzon, Paul, and Solomon, but for self preservation, they’re Hoenn Rat, Beautiful Hands, and FairSilk. They don’t get names, lest they become real.

_Bygones be Ishmael-_

_Bygones have a favorite color,_ Rose rattles off while Hands waxes poetic about being damned to suffer. Something about everything being too expensive. Something about how no one asks to be born. Hoenn Rat rambles an extended aside about a waitress with a stunning neck. “She was always so nice to me, the only person who was nice to me.”

 _They’re paid to be nice, to you,_ Rose doesn’t say. 

_Lair,_ a voice counters. It sounds like his own, but younger and more indignant. In his mind’s eye he sees himself, with a bruise on the side of his head, eating a burger with his mother at the Unova style diner. (Neptune Burger, was it?) The waitress would get him a milkshake sometimes, on the house. She wasn’t paid for the free milkshake.

Gods, he doesn’t even remember her name.

* * *

Jack isn’t his real name. It doesn’t matter. It hurts all the same.

A collection of foil flowers grows in haphazard piles over his meager possessions.

* * *

When he finds Bede, he’s old enough to be his son, but Rose isn’t ready to be a father. He put Oleana through school while working two jobs and studying at uni, but they were close in age and “guardian” holds less power than “father.” It’s a technicality. He jumps loops to mitigate the terror of simple words. He holds so much power over this child. This child wants a father, but Rose cannot slot into a father’s shape anymore than his mother can slot into a nurturing dress.

They tiptoe around it with sponsorships and in scholarships. Bede goes to a prestigious trainer school, and they exchange limited contact in letters and occasional emails. He excels in his studies, and gets gifts from Rose during holidays, inferred from asking him if there’s anything he needs or wants, or what needs replacing.

Father. The F word. A technicality.

Gods, he actually forgot his name.

* * *

“There’s this barking mad lie my dad would always say.” The man with beautiful hands cracks his knuckles; a frequent nervous tic. He purses his lips at an unspoken recollection. Rose leans forward, though he can hear him fine from the other side of the room. “I’m hurting you because I love you. This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

“Like hell it does,” he spits. ( _Paul R**** - Paul from the low security unit. Paul with the slim fingers-)_ “He was driving me home from a doctor’s appointment before I left, see. Sobbing like a wet bog roll. Said he was jealous of me because I had actual talent.”

“He should have sorted himself out before having kids,” Rose says before he can stop himself. The room halts to a creak; his body plastered to the spot with seven pairs of eyes.

_Listening is fine. Listening is safe. Bygones be bygones. Call me Ishmael. Call me Satya. A truth, but not the truth._

Paul smiles politely. His face lacks bite. “Gonna put a one child policy on Galar when you get outta the pompey?”

“Mandatory parenting lessons for everyone who’s expecting,” Rose returns cooly.

“I’m holdin’ ya to that.” 

* * *

The bygones have names. The bygones are real. The bygones are brief, furtive slices, preserved in pencil and pen. The bygone with flawless palms takes him by the hand and kisses his knuckle and forefinger.

It is painful. It is painless. 

* * *

At trainer school, Greasy Pigtail receives letters from her mother every week, and packets of scented stickers. She complains about being suffocated by her affections. Bede wonders what that sort of suffocation even feels like. At seven he imagines it like thick blankets in the dead of winter; mountains of mountains of warm quilts that make you never want to leave your bed. In his mind’s eye, he yanks off her red bow and howls at her for being a brat.

He excels in his studies, with the exception of maths. He also excels in replacing nameless emotions with anger, because anger is an easy fire that kindles vengeance, and vengeance gets tasks completed. Anger hurts less than shame. Anger stings less than the hunger that fills him when schoolmates talk about their parents.

Bede savors all of Rose’s impersonal emails; meticulously folds his impeccable clothes. The man says he’ll grow into the Rolex, but for now it dangles on his wrist like a strange paperweight that sits wrong on his limbs. If he wishes hard enough, will Rose grow into something like a father? If he works hard enough, will Bede prove himself enough to be something akin to a son?

(Gods, he actually forgot his name-)

Bede’s wrist never quite fills in the watch, so he has it adjusted to fit. Hop insists that he toss it or pawn it, but Rose never claimed to be anything more than what he is, and Bede is still grateful. That said, what little warm feelings he’s managed stop short of wanting to visit his not-father while he’s incarcerated. The years pass and unfurl its strange, unexpected shape. Opal grows weaker. Rose dies.

He passes while participating in an experimental study in jail. The weight of it is a muffled gunshot in a faraway room; a train derailing hundreds of miles away. Bede has no tears to shed. He’s a stranger who gave him a pokemon once, and money for school. He’s also family enough that the employee on the other end of the line has asked him to come take what’s left of Rose’s belongings that others have not already picked through.

 _Another Rolex,_ Bede thinks sourly on the cab ride to the facility. They usher him into a nondescript office that spills afternoon light onto minimalist architecture. Oleana sits at the opposite end of the small table, at the center of which rests a shoebox sized tin worth of worthless trinkets to sift through.

“Uh,” he starts. This is the last person he’d like to see, and she’s not making the first move, so he steps forward and opens the lid. He wasn’t certain what to expect, but a small tupperware full of gold origami flowers was last on the itinerary. Oleana remains still, watching him sift through the contents. He opens the lid, nearly expecting the foil to refold into fireflies and escape, but they’re solid, mortal shapes upon closer inspection. They are dead, just as Rose is dead. 

There’s five mechanical pencils of varying builds, and two click pens. The ubiquitous Rolex makes its appearance in a small brown envelope, along with a pearl earring and a thin gold anklet. An embroidered white kerchief wedges itself in the bottom of the manila- white fabric with pink flowers, with an emblazoned pastel green _S_ in delicate cursive. The last of his effects is a hardbound black notebook slightly longer than the average palm; unruled. Bede flips to a random page. His fingers tremble at an image of his younger self in Fairy type sports regalia, faithfully and skillfully rendered in blue ballpoint.

It is then that he realizes, all too late, that Oleana has not moved because she is likely in shock.

Bede pushes his seat closer to her. She startles from her thousand mile reverie, but does not speak. The book is just a bit too large to fit in a man’s pocket without difficulty, but small enough to fold open and take up little room. He pretends he’s flipping a picture book for a small child, with sizeable pauses to take in the contents. 

He’s nineteen and Rose is dead. He reminds himself that offering space to mourn does not equal forgiveness, but when Oleana’s eyes water when the pages show her with a stuffed Munna, Bede cannot tell the difference.

The trap exists for the monster. You catch the monster, and you forget the trap. Words exist as placeholders. You’re struck in the eyes with sensation, and you forget the meaning. Oleana says he can keep the book, if she can keep the rest. She’s giving herself the less valuable end of the bargain. 

It’s as close to an apology as Oleana can offer, and he’ll gladly take it.

* * *

Rose is legally dead, on a technicality, but his body is a donation to the bleeding edges of science. When humans catch a near death pokemon in a standard grade pokeball, they are released on the brink of death with all of their injuries. Mundane resuscitations are a fact of life for animals. Should they not be for humans? 

(Revives don’t work on mankind. This is not the point of the exercise.)

Rose is dead. Workers take him in and out of containment in two year intervals to examine his corpse. His organs are pristine and impeccably kept, though sometimes they are outside of him and artfully rearranged, like a butterfly shroud of spilled wine. Oleana threatens to buy their operation. Oleana threatens to hang their entrails on the petals of Wyndon stadium. On the thirteenth year, she makes due on the former.

Her first demand is privacy with the body.

_My touch isn’t going to hurt you anymore._

In the fifteenth year, Rose leaves the ball alive. His memories are as vulnerable to tears as New Year confetti. He shouts and sobs about a noose of light. He yanks intravenous tubes from the sickly edges of wasted limbs, and begs to see Oleana. 

Rose is alive. Rose is also legally dead. Oleana ties the paradox clean, and sends him to social exile in a Turrfield cottage. _For your own good,_ she tells herself more than him, but her heart free falls when he does not bother fighting her. He feeds stray Rookidees with wilted celery pieces and cracked nuts on Sunday mornings, takes what she offers, and paints skies with student grade Cerulean blue. 

_This is what love is,_ says a voice that sounds like her own, but younger and more desperate. She expected more of a fight. What is even left over after someone stops fighting? Does he think this is a recompense? Is he rewarding her for her patience? Does he think this is _penance?_

“I don’t want your sorry excuse for sorry!” Oleana shouts in between fat rolls of tears while Satya sleeps in watery teals and dull khaki. Bank nudges her hand. She balls her fingers tighter.

“I want-” she starts, and stops herself.

What she wants is not something Rose can give without her further destroying him. He’s told her little, but she knows enough and sees his vices mirrored in her own private affairs. Love undiluted is alien to them both, and instead comes accompanied with violence, or obligation, or a volatile combination of the two. 

“Take-” Satya starts, heavy with sleep; affection laced and awful. Oleana cries into her sleeve; suddenly thirteen again and covered in slush from falling on dirty snow. “Take from me-”

“No,” she chokes, though she’s taken already. Her head shakes. She wipes uselessly at her eyes. The faucet won’t stop.

He smiles with his eyes closed, soft and intimate; a fugue of the polish he offers to the news. 

“Oleana. I’ve loved you for so long.”

“I’m- I’m hurting you.”

No matter how much she lies, it will still be true.

“It’s a price I can pay, for you,” he murmurs quietly, before rolling his head to the side and growing quiet.

* * *

The first week of November heralds her next visit with heavy rain. They do not have sex. She buys him a 24-set tin of watercolors from Kalos. He paints the Rookidee who’s made a home on his back porch, along with the myriad of stray birds that regularly visit for free food.

“When I die, they’re going to divide my soul into small pieces and scatter the bits across Galar,” Satya says to her without a hint of jest. A Pidove preens close to his neck.

Oleana believes him.

* * *

Bede pours through the sketchbook on rainy days and trying days. He sprays pencil marks with fixative to prevent graphite from smearing. Paper margins spill with notes in a language he doesn’t know, and a cipher he broke half a decade ago (with Hop’s help, though he kept him in the dark about the source). He assumes that half of the illustrations are of prisoners in stiff uniforms; some of them beautiful, some made beautiful with flattering marks. Rose annotates them strangely, with fanciful pseudonyms and artful judgment.

_-Hoenn rat / price to pay for carelessness / killed mother with two children / keeps talking about waitress he’s in love with. Shite for brains_

_-Dainty 25 / Former prostitute, charged top dollar to go on dinner dates. Calls himself a companion / keeps trying to flirt with me / I told him I find the human body revolting / said that love and disgust are both strong emotions that sometimes form a handshake_

_\- Jack needs to come out of the closet and get a dating app (picture of shoulders with face covered in violent scribbles)_

_\- FairSilk washes his hands clean because he only hosted the forum and he’s not personally responsible for the contents / people sold sex slaves on your forum, FairSilk / one day you’re going to have your throat slit by the nonce hunters once they get wise_

_\- Man with beautiful hands would have gone to uni if he had white parents / I am sorry Paul / you can claw your way out, you have to_

(He forgot his name he forgot his name he forgot his name)

_-Opal will do a wonderful job with him, better than me_

In equal parts conceit and hunger, Bede flips to Rose’s drawings of him more times than he cares to admit. They’re all done in pen in deliberate strokes, as though he’s taken care to make him permanent. Crazy talk, maybe. Rationalizations, but his face and Oleana’s are consistently more polished than the other mugs, rendered in careful line that must have taken time and diligence. He pictures Rose hunched over in the dark of his room while swirling a mark on his hair. He squints at the strokes with ravenous want.

 _This is what love is,_ a voice inside him thunders. He scans the individual pages in spreads, and entertains asking Oleana permission to publish them, but ultimately decides against it. She’d complain about preserving his image, or some other rubbish. Maybe she’d cry instead. That would be worse.

Words exist for communication. Hide words with a cipher, and someone will beg to know what you really meant. But it’s not as though he can wake Rose up and ask him why he wasn’t good enough to be his son. Rose is dead.

“Perhaps he wasn’t ready,” Opal muses while feeding oil to the wheelchair Rotom, whose engine purrs at her gentle care. “ _Guardian_ instead of _Father_. Words are just words, but words have meaning. He thought the distance would help you instead of harm you. That doesn’t excuse his sins against you, but even the best intentions can be paved with bones.”

Bede fiddles with the Rolex on his wrist, teeth clenching together instead of indulging whatever weakness he would dare to say.

* * *

_(annotation on a ripped edge)_

_Jack tried to have a go at Paul a few weeks back. Ruined his beautiful hands punching the bloke’s mug.  
Those scars are there for life. Said it was fine and dandy as long as I gave him a drawing of his face for the trouble. _

_He got released today. He’ll never shut up about that souvenir. Better off selling it, I say._

* * *

Mandatory Holiday functions are a gym staple, held a week and a half prior to the days where everyone fucks off to their families. Bede picks his gifts after a cursory lurk on everyone’s social media. Artisan crafted Mawile teeth guitar picks for Marnie. Gag gift Wooloo salad tongs for Milo. Hideous Applin hoodie for Raihan. He’s bound to get his quota of “you’re never this funny in conversation” jabs. Raihan’s going to try to one up his gifts. They’ve had an unofficial rivalry running with how stupid their holiday presents can get, for the fifth year in a row.

He likes them well enough, as far as coworkers go. Oleana actually attends this year, though she’s quieter than usual and resigned herself to sitting at a lounge chair facing the night skyline. She’s gifted all the gym leaders and the champion with what Bede strongly suspects to be jewelry. They’re in small, uniform navy boxes with white ribbon. Rolexes, he almost jokes to himself, but that isn’t her style.

“You look terrible,” Bede offers as he seats himself near her without prompting. Behind them, Raihan poses with the tacky hoodie with his friends. He anticipates a Sylveon onesie in retaliation. Oleana watches the city lights and answers his insult with a shrug.

“Mind if I open this now?” he asks, gentler. The box is small in his hand, and weighs near insubstantial. Definitely not a gold watch. She nods to give the go ahead, and he unspools the ribbon and sets aside the lid on the table.

Bede chokes. It is a rose gold origami bird in mid flight on a thin chain, the casting not even wider than his thumb. She must have modeled it after the foil ones in the tupperware all those years ago, mixed in with all the flowers. There’s no time to recover from his discovery. Nessa barrels between them to compliment the white gold waterlily. Marnie gets a morning glory pin. Raihan is momentarily overwhelmed by the boxy, titanium dragon, coiled like a spire to wind around his finger.

_Traps exist to catch the monster. Catch the monster and you can discard the trap-_

“Excuse me for a moment,” he says to all of them, while blood drains from his face.

He runs to the bathroom. He weeps in a free stall. 

_This is what love is,_ he thinks, struggling to stay quiet. He clenches the metal bird in an aching palm.

Rose is dead. None of this should matter anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're halfway through this monster. Thanks for reading so far.
> 
> A short list of references/acknowledgments:  
> Moby Dick, by Herman Melville  
> [Paper Eleven (Content warning for horror)](http://manga.clone-army.org/pxi.php?page=1)  
> [Mondegreens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen)  
> [Teletransportation paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox)  
> [Saint Saviour- This Ain't No Hymn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzsJBTFwBQQ)


	8. Opera Pink, the Sky, and the Dragon

Milo would see Satya more often than not before daybreak, ambling along the countryside like a soft crease in the dawn’s dim blanket. The Wooloo occasionally watch his procession with half-interest before returning to graze. Sometimes Milo watches too, and finds his form not unlike Mum’s nutcrackers under her kitchen cabinet: a stiff soldier of nameless affiliation. Must have cracked a few nuts in his lifetime. Must have been efficient about it.

Walden the warless sentinel, who writes slipstream fiction and paints the morning. Satya Nadella, whose name is definitely a decoy, because sticking him in search engines just points to Microsoft’s CEO. This is none of his business, but it is the countryside’s duty to be nosy. Nosiness is just the more thorough cousin of concern, after all, for good or for ill.

He’s still doing those walks in early January's chill, to his credit, with a recently acquired consort of birds that are too numerous to see as anything but a unit. They blot the horizon; a flurry of ink stains splashed over sky and dirt. Wooloo herds eye his footsteps with rapt attention, and Milo does as well, with a wave of his arm to mitigate the strangeness of this exchange. Satya returns the gesture, then resumes spilling finely cubed carrots on the dirt path. Under the brim of his straw hat, he counts six wild Corviknights.

Today is Friday- Satya’s grocery day, every two weeks in the early evenings when most have gone home. He’ll hedge his bets on the man being too polite to decline an invitation to dinner. Politeness is an expectation. Nosiness is the natural outcome when met with something strange.

(Grass is weak to Flying.)

“Mornin’! Paint anything new?” Milo half shouts. He grips onto his hat while the smaller birds scatter away, frightened by his voice.

“Lemons,” Satya says cordially, though his eyes do not match the smile on his mouth. “Not my best.”

“You don’t say.”

Milo holds  _ ‘You look a bit like the late former Chairman,’ _ behind the reliable cage of his teeth. He’s held worse things behind his mouth. The teeth never fail, and even if the teeth fail the sheep won’t.

“Ever tried your hand at children’s books?” he says instead, mentally folding the wrinkles in his periphery. “It’s easy to self publish these days.”

“Made one a long time ago,” Satya replies, and this time, the smile is genuine. “It er… it consistently nets me about one chocolate bar a month. Sometimes two. Published it under some absurd pen name. Opera Naples, I think?”

Milo’s mouth thins. 

“Opera. Naples. Er. Can I see it?”

(You look a bit less like the late Chairman-)

This is the first time he’s heard this stranger laugh. Satya pulls up his phone, and digs up a listing in a hideous, dated website. The square book cover features a child with his parents strolling along a lovingly painted beach, plastered over with hideous Italic Arial.  _ Ahab’s Afternoon Beach Imagination Adventures by Opera Naples  _ emblazons the cover in navy blue. Milo keeps his preference for a serif font to himself.

“It sold a bit better when I used to advertise it,” he starts, and the soldier softens to something like a man; like nuts crushed to nut butter, with hard shells dusted away. “It was grocery money when I was younger.”

An emotion creeps up that suspiciously resembles guilt. Milo brushes it aside. “The cover painting is beautiful. The name is weird, though. Why did you pick that?”

“If you mix Opera Pink and Naples Yellow together, it makes this gentle peach color… A sunset sort of color. A sky that makes you want to go to bed early.” 

Satya makes a face that Milo hesitates to categorize. His eyes find themselves at the faint bob of the man’s throat, and he’s silently assaulted with wave after wave of shame. It tumbles like clouds in a tender sunset, the soundless cortège shifting in unnamed yellows and foreign peaches. His ability to disarm has always been his most useful skill, and one so easy to dismiss. How painless it is, to inscript a stranger into scrutiny.

“I’d like to apologize, Satya,” Milo says, because he ought to. “I’ve been a bit tense around you these months, though I’ve tried to minimize it. It’s just that, you look a bit like the late Chairman Rose. Er, former Chairman. It doesn’t make sense, I know. He’d be in his fifties now. See, it’s terribly silly. I’m sorry again.”

Satya eyes mirror heavy grade school marbles. He grasps at the buttons on his sweater, then forces a laugh that sounds more like a choke. “The late chairman. Oh. Oh goodness. I. I don’t. I don’t have that much money. I think. Goodness. Bit of a...”

(Oh. He’s offended him. Wonderful.)

“Good talk,” Satya manages eventually. “No worries. Late for breakfast though. Be seeing you, Milo.”

“Be seeing you,” he replies, and slowly raises his hand to wave goodbye.

Satya, stiff as his mother’s nutcrackers, scurries to the door of his house by the stream. His flock of birds loiter by the water, as though taking turns standing guard. The Wooloo lose interest, and return to picking at scant winter grass. Milo does not. He fumbles for his phone, and quickly loses time planted on a wooden fence and pouring through paint mixing videos, ultimately leaving empty handed.

Opera Pink and Naples Yellow is the color of his nutcracker’s jacket. It’s a color Milo doesn’t know, so it may as well be nothing. Transparent, ill formed, like ghosts that roam thorny corners of the Wild Area. The soldier cracked plenty of nuts, and resigned himself to exile in a cottage in Turrfield. None of his children visit. Does he have children?

_ A nutcracker that no longer cracks nuts is no longer a nutcracker, _ sings the intrusive bastard in Milo’s head. He’s made a caricature of himself in there: bumbling, sleepy, and prone to flights of fancies like limericks and tongue twisters. The bastard costumes Satya in ambiguous peach, or buttery orange. Satya’s jaw unhinges, and he vomits Naples yellow onto a blank slate of white, while his tear ducts run over in lurid Opera Pink.

_ A nutcracker that no longer cracks nuts is a ghost, _ Milo thinks. It is senseless. It makes sense.

* * *

Breakfast is hot oats with chopped cashews and raisins. Breakfast is routine, and easy to make. Eating is disordered, especially during stress, and hard to do. Rose downs two cups of hibiscus tea, considers the rapidly cooling curdle, and resigns himself to dumping the contents outside. Pidoves peck at the sludge. He pictures the slurry in Alizarin Crimson, and imagines his insides lined with his mother’s fingers, standing in disarrayed rows like dark cactuses in a desert of red.

The flock picks apart phalanges, peeling away skin to expose bone. There is no place inside him unmarked by her touch, but the birds tear faithfully at her fleshy towers. No borders exist where his mother ends and he begins. Cut away enough pieces, and maybe he’ll die for good. Rose flinches. Fingers return to wrinkled, dried grapes, gobbled and swallowed by hungry beaks. 

After the meal, the birds linger in his backyard, and their dark eyes regard him like a bland spectacle, or an overdue spectre.  _ They’ve come to collect, _ Rose thinks suddenly, frantic and afraid. He hasn’t been able to punch in his name in a search bar to confirm his death. Confirmation means finality. Finality perches on his shoulder; Rookidee runt of the group who preens the scant trim of Rose’s hair. 

He bends his knees to sit on the back steps. Old wood creaks under him, and smaller birds huddle closer to cluster by his ankles. The dust between his ears settle. He’ll wind himself sideways with delusions that there’s actually a soul left inside him to pick at. They’re here for the food. He spoils more food than he’s willing to accept- younger Rose would shriek at him at his wastefulness. Younger Rose would take him out to the back to be shot-

Finality rubs at his neck, and abandons him for a barren berry tree. Rose wrings his sleeves, and goes back inside. What is there left? There’s little to do, post retirement- post exile? Post death? Post death, there is shopping every two weeks, on Friday evenings. Post excarnation, Oleana comes on Saturdays, and he loathes that he sees herself in him like a carbon transfer trace. Something’s obliterated what used to be there, in him (in her?) - like maggots clearing out bones to pearly whites.

( _ Please don’t cry, _ he begs impotently)

_ You lot are foolish to believe that emptiness is inherently obliteration,  _ Kabu drones, young and arrogant in a grainy interview tape seared into his brain. Rose and Oleana used to watch recorded matches on her winter break in his tuna can apartment together, and he still remembers this exact day, this exact match. 

Oleana grabs the remote and pauses without warning. Kabu’s mouth freezes into a soft oval mid speech. His charge scowls in a pastel green t-shirt dress, head turning away from him. At first, he assumes that she is annoyed at his windowless schedule- understandable, because juggling uni, an internship, and several jobs leaves him little left to spend with her when she visits. It also gives him less free time to cook, and she’s prone to eating him out of house and home every winter break.

She crosses her arms. She looks so small. She sounds so small.

“Do you not like me?” the girl says, deflated. It takes Rose aback. “You. You don’t hold me. Ever.”

“Oleana. That’s not true at all. I’m very fond of you.”

Her downturned mouth remains unconvinced.

“I am, er,” he starts, and holds back wincing. This was difficult enough to explain to his colleagues at Macro Cosmos. (Don’t slap me on the back like you know me, you prick-) 

“I’m not much of a hugger, that’s all. People have different ways of communicating that they care about other people. Some people like to do things for others, like run for errands, or making sure they eat. Others offer words of encouragement, or give gifts, or give hugs. I care about you a lot. I am just not the sort of person to show care by touch.”

“All people ever used to do was  _ touch _ me,” she states dully.

_ no _

_ No _

_ no no nononononononononononono oh gods no no nono nononononononononono 123 123 12345 6 7/8th Naples Yellow and 1/8th Opera Pink. Dilute with water. Paint Musharna's face. Carbazole Violet's slightly granulating properties suit this dream pokemon's body, though if you have money to spare, Amethyst Genuine's pigment is made with real gemstones. Doesn't she know I love her?  _ **_Oleana_ ** _ no longer paints her nails. Alizarin Crimson is a fugitive color, and will fade with time. Not in the way she wants me to love her. You've taken so many unplanned naps.  _ **_Why_ ** _? It ruins your sleep schedule.  _ **_You_ ** _ wake up before morning. Eternatus could let you sleep longer, maybe. Can he do that? You  _ **_could_ ** _ ask him. You  _ **_have_ ** _ meal replacement drinks. Should have  _ **_told_ ** _ him sooner. Food shopping in the evening. Oleana tomorrow. Fucking hurts  _ **_me_ ** _ less these days. Fucking hurts less for the same reason  _ **_I can't_ ** _ plug my name in a search bar.  _ **_Say,_ ** _ it's like floating,  _ **_no_ ** _? Nice  _ **_to_ ** _ walk on the beach with  _ **_you_ ** _ , _ **_I_ ** _ say.  _ **_Don't_ ** _ we all  _ **_deserve to_ ** _ treat ourselves once in a while? _

  
  


"Satya," says a voice.

"Satya," demands the voice. "Satya, crushed flower, you are dying.”

Sea waves lap at Rose's bare feet. Plush clouds march in Naples Yellow in a backdrop of Opera Pink, while the glimmering sunset casts a white, interrupted strip of light where sky meets sea. He rakes nails chewed to the blunt into the sand. His legs are too small, and littered with dark marks where his mother's thin plastic belt would lick at open skin.

There's something in his jacket pocket. The sandwich is heavier than he remembers, like a slab of meat wrapped in foil. Ishmael sits closer to him, clothed in new flesh that bleeds and fuzzes in the edges. Rose struggles to make sense of the form his companion takes. University trim attire, like the kids who fed him. Bede's eyes. Oleana's spindly limbs. Father's voice. Leon's stupid crown snapback.

"Should I come get you?" the dragon asks, oddly tender. "My motives are not entirely selfless. I am afraid to die, too."

He squints at the ambiguous mass that is Ishmael's glamour, but ultimately gives up trying to parse it into understandable shapes. Rose peels at the foil in his hands and finds a heart inside, with the hidden knife in Oleana's spectacles plunged to the hilt.

"Oh. I stopped wearing those glasses." Rose pulls at the handle, curved and thin and designed for curling around an ear. The metal of the slim blade gleams clean and bloodless. He tosses it into the water.

"You've been dying for months," Ishmael continues, and Rose finds himself savoring the concern. "You don't remember using the knife on yourself not long after you moved here."

_ Poison tip, _ Oleana's voice repeats. A prick on the finger should have done him off within half an hour.

The heart on his palms grows warmer. Distantly, he acknowledges that he should be feeling something other than calm, but the breeze is cool and the sea shudders softly. These are perfect conditions to sleep on the beach, in different circumstances.

So many questions to ask. Countless little mercies. Accusations like jabs with a pen knife to the chest. They wash away with the tide, drifting further and further from him. Rose can only manage one.

"What do you mean by  _ come get me _ ?"

* * *

It’s taken months of schedule rearrangement to plan a camping trip between the three of them, winter or no winter. Thursday night to Friday evening drops on their laps like a brief reprieve from the dark. Bede counts his mercies, and holds any occult jokes under his tongue. His counterparts have held gods in their pockets for a decade and a half. They even have their tents in an equilateral triangle.

_ The summoning will fail,  _ he muses to himself. For all the years toiling to be something extraordinary, his curse is to be surrounded by people who have gathered things he cannot possess. 

Hop lays a hand on Bede’s shoulder, toppling him out of self pity. “Something bothering you?”

“Hungry,” he deflects, gloved palms finding purchase on the thinning grass.

“Give us some time,” Hop says with a lopsided grin. Bede reminds himself that these people love him, and it softens the blow. “Big crowd to cook for. Gloria and I are still arguing about whether or not to use pungent root. Hate that stuff, personally.”

From the distance, Gloria gleefully pulls out her middle finger.

“We have three pots,” Bede deadpans. “Turn it into a contest. Me and the pokemon can judge.”

“Noted. You really should have been a professor.”

_ Don’t have the brains for it,  _ he thinks, but keeps it to himself. He surveys the campsite with dulled interest, and watches their pokemon frolic and quibble amongst themselves. Gloria hums a tune while measuring unfamiliar spices with golden cups. She’s still wearing the tacky applin beret from the holiday party five years ago, and Hop’s Corviknight has taken to chewing at the green fabric sprouting from the center. Had Bede knew that she would have never taken it off, he would have invested in something nicer for her. 

"Why isn't Ishmael out?" Bede asks. A notable lack of giant poison dragon hovering above them and tinging the sky pink is not exactly easy to miss.

"He's been sleeping at 9:15 sharp every night for the past few months," Gloria supplies, rubbing her chin. "I haven't asked about it. Hop thinks it's got something to do with energy conservation."

Eternatus shares the average bedtime of an elderly citizen. Opal retires for the evening at 8:45, after a cup of valerian blend. The absurdity of it is not lost on him.

"He's huge and came from space," Hop interjects. "No matter how many pungent roots you stick in your curry, somehow I don't think it's enough to satiate his caloric intake. I wish you'd let me have a go at him in the lab. He might even be losing mass, but that dynamax energy masks it."

Gloria grimaces. "Ishmael doesn't  _ want _ you to have a go at him in the lab. We've been through this."

Zamazenta approaches Bede and nuzzles at his hair. He reaches automatically to scratch between the ears. 

_ I know. I hate it when they argue, too. _

Hop's scoff registers as a pale puff of air in the cold. "Can't you just sweet talk him into it? Should be effortless for you."

“For a pokemon professor, you’re awfully ignorant about issues with consent when it comes to experimentation.”

“Says the woman with a living dex.”

Paz, his Hatterine, stomps her feet into the ground in the far side of the camp. She’ll come to him if she wants to go back into her ball until their quibble is over. Hop’s Dubwool follows after her, bleating soft, apologetic pleas. Bede’s eyes find the sky. He lays down on the grass, and tunes out the sound of their voices. The dogs join him. Zacian’s muzzle brushes against the side of his head, with a string of sensation that vaguely translates to,  _ Walk. Walk now. _

“Taking the puppies out for a stroll,” Bede interrupts, standing up like an agitated spring. He mounts Zacian’s back. Paz hurries to his side, and returns to her ball. “Leave some food for us.”

“Bede,” Hop calls out, immediately apologetic. 

Gloria follows suit. “We’re so sorry, Bede. This was supposed to be a fun trip.”

“It’s fine,” he lies, while digging into his pockets for earmuffs. “We won’t be out too long.”

This isn’t the first time their legendaries took him out on loan. The first time involved a lot more aghast faces and confusion. Bede’s understanding comes in brief sparks that light the otherwise endless canvas of dark. Godhood has fine print. Zamazenta, blunter of the two, said once that they choose their humans, and it’s helpful to vet the humans that their humans choose. 

Beats filling out an application, at least. It’s common enough now to raise minimal questions, but rare enough to punctuate otherwise mundane events. The initial takeoff still makes Bede’s stomach churn; smoother than Rapidash hooves against wet grass. He clings to Zacian’s neck with both arms. Their movements are more akin to gliding instead of a gallop, and it calls to mind golden carousels at fancy parks. The forest trees blur into formless curtains of dark. Bede presses close to sleek, smooth fur, and closes his eyes.

“Are you punishing them for throwing a tantrum?” he asks at last, once the vertigo pries away like a shed skin. It always pulls away eventually (legendaries, as expected), and if he doesn’t see where they are, he can disconnect from the wrongness of it. 

_ They should know better by now,  _ Zamazenta huffs. Bede thinks it’s a huff, anyway. These aren’t words they are forming, but that definitely translates into a huff, or another expression of indignation.

“They don’t see each other very often,” Bede supplies. The wind feels more like a jet stream; like high tide washing him away. “You add distance into the mix with humans, and it leaves them time to overthink their relationships.”

_ Elaborate, _ Zacian orders.  _ Temporal distance? Geographical? Spiritual? _

“Hop got over his crush on her over a decade ago and now he’s free to feel all the envy he’s swallowed before.”

_ Hop wants to hold you like a flower slowly opening, _ Zamazenta helpfully offers, apropos of nothing. 

(wow)

“Is. Is that so.”

_ So does Gloria,  _ says Zacian. Bede wants to plug his ears, but they’re not speaking with words. Also, he’ll fall, but somehow this is much lower on his list of priorities.  _ She thinks a reasonable distance is better between both of you, because of the inherent dangers of being too near. _

“Inherent dangers of being too near,” Bede repeats carefully, gargling the words like water in his mouth. 

* * *

**Log *******

Bede gave me some sentences to crack. Didn’t tell me where they were from. Guessing this is one of his jokes, so it’s probably a boring substitution cipher that says “bite my arse, you spoiled cunt” or whatever convoluted sort of flirting that he’s into. I’m not one to talk. Pot calls the kettle a little bitch, and what have you.

Might do it once I’m done with these papers. So many papers. Sonia and I are working to the bone, and we never get enough grant money through conventional means. Media keeps calling me an understated attention whore, but it gets the cash in.

I am smart AND I’m handsome. I know. Eat shite and stay bitter. 

Leon’s moping today. Anniversary of Rose’s death. I ordered him a pizza.

**Log *******

Sentences include diatrics. Writer is not speaking English. Word clusters don’t seem familiar. I swear if this shite is a conlang invented by Opal I’m going to tear my face off. Bede loves to see me suffer.

I caved and asked him for a hint. He says that the cipher might translate to Kelen. I’m not exactly a slut for constructed languages, Bede. I didn’t read Tolkien like a cultist, nor do I speak fluent Klingon. My interests are a lot more boring. Throw me a bone, here.

Dumped it in the search bar. Conlang without verbs. I guess it still sort of has verbs, but not verbs in a traditional sense. Whatever, this makes my job easier.

**Log *******

Leon should really lay off the alcohol. Getting tired of dropping everything to fuck off to his apartment. Grow up, loser.

**Log *******

He could have just told me this was Rose’s journal. 

It’s like digging up a dead man’s corpse reading this.

**Log *******

Hope his rehab goes well. Sonia’s worried.

* * *

_ Translated from Kelen, an invented language by Sylvia Sotomayor. Decoded from a crude Caesar shift with a right shift of five (notably, Bede’s gym is the fifth in line in the gym challenge). _

_ Cluster 1: _

-Easier to ask forgiveness than permission, can’t ask either or 

-45 minutes, is he paying off the other guards to turn away? What is the psychologist getting out of allowing him to use that room?

-Nothing here tastes good. It’s all ashes, or cigarette butts in a tray. Cold Charlie trying to get me to smoke cigarettes made from rationed spinach. Do stay away from me, Cold Charlie. I am not interested.

-That bird site would regularly complain about CEOs doing less work than retail workers. The old Macro Cosmos would defend his position to the death. He’s doing a public service. He’s getting tax write-offs for his donations. The donations are publicity stunts.

I did retail as soon as I was old enough to lie. And then the mines, once I was big enough to convincingly lie. They’re right on all accounts. Businesses can last for months and potentially even years without an acting CEO. The old CEO was so incompetent that I stole a full ride scholarship for Oleana’s private school without him ever noticing.

Fair price for him calling me “upstanding, for your backdrop.” I should have stolen his teeth.

_ Cluster 2: _

-Not getting closer to Bede is one of my biggest regrets, but with all things said and done, he’s faring well with Opal. I’m not going to get a chance to apologize. 

Isn’t an apology so often for the aggressor’s benefit, and not the victim? I doubt he wants an apology.

-My high school friends called this “reaching escape velocity.” You need to build up enough momentum to “reach escape velocity.” Some people are placed higher above the surface, but for people below sea level, there’s added challenges to “reach escape velocity.” 

Risk of drowning. Don’t know how to swim. Not adapted to life above water. The people by the hills call you a thinly disguised racial slur. All barriers to escape velocity.

-I miss Oleana.

_ Cluster 3: _

-”complicit”

-1 in 10 risk of complications. I hope I get to die.

* * *

“Will it hurt?” Rose asks, though he’s not particularly concerned about it hurting.

“Do you want it to hurt?” Ishmael counters. If the dragon’s veneer still had eyes, he would be rolling them.

The sky darkens, pitch black with moon sized stars. A pool of blood has replaced the sea, warm like a caress over bare legs. Ishmael takes his left wrist. The dragon’s form is a void shaped man, or a man shaped void; a glowing white cutout just barely large enough to walk through. 

“Not really partial to any sensation,” Rose decides. “Take your preference.”

Arms sling over his shoulders, or a close approximation of arms. There’s a hand over his head, and the telltale sign of tears. Wetness pools over his shoulder. Rose closes his eyes.

“Hope those aren’t for me,” the man says dryly.

“Satya, you’re an idiot,” Ishmael sobs, sinking further into his body.

The light burns him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for everyone's patience. I've tossed this around for the whole month.
> 
> Stay safe during Plague 2020. I'm sick, but signs point to asthma rather than COVID-19. The joys of being immunocompromized.
> 
> Special thanks to the regulars.
> 
> EDIT:  
> Bede's theme for Castle is definitely [Renaissance Dogs by Exabyte](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvjNJf0Ntss)  
> Oleana's is [Mozartine's Running Up that Hill cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K__jHroSfpk)  
> [Introduction to Kelen](http://www.terjemar.net/kelen/kelen.php)


	9. ANXNYFYNTS FY YMJ HFXYQJ

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features [Dark Suns - Yes, Anastasia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N1h5MxHgbU) In universe, it is sung by Piers.
> 
> It is a cover of [Tori Amos's 1994 song of the same name.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUazhfLiG6U)

The dogs drop him off near the campsite. A shroud envelops the horizon, misting Bede’s vision with lacelike folds that he cannot touch. Warily, he dismounts. Everything remains in the same place, though Hop and Gloria have quieted down; morose and sullen as they take bites from their curry. Neither humans nor pokemon acknowledge their presence from behind the veil. 

“This is eavesdropping,” Bede remarks, but the gods ignore him.

His fingers pass through a bowl of curry placed on top of a log, covered by a tin plate. Gloria wrings the Applin hat, worrying red felt between her thumbs. He really ought to ask her to return it to him to sew up the frayed bits. 

(Somehow, repairing her beret is higher in his priorities than gods showing him the reverse face of the veil. His younger self would have a field day.)

Hop puts down his mug and hugs his arms. “Never thought he’d grow up to be the most level headed out of all of us.”

“I don’t think that’s it, though he has mellowed out a lot,” Gloria says, and her gentleness borders on painful. “Bede’s just better at prioritizing what battles are worth fighting, and which aren’t worth the effort.”

“He’s been right about me being a brat for years,” Hop adds wistfully. “If you’re used to getting what you want, that’s not something you’ll ever bother to learn.”

_This is EAVESDROPPING, I don’t CARE that they’re complimenting me, I don’t CARE that I’m right-_

“We should make it up to him,” Gloria murmurs. 

The mist clears like cellophane slowly unraveling. Bede walks towards them, and quietly picks up the curry serving that they left for him. Hop waves a hand at his return, while Gloria offers him a mug of tea. He mutters perfunctory thank you’s, and sets his eyes on the two legendaries wandering further towards the water, as though nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

_Eavesdropping must be normal for them. All gods ever do is eavesdrop, be nosy, and lie-_

“How was the evening stroll?” Hop asks with a cheeky smile, planting a hand on his shoulder. “Any juicy gossip? Did Galar’s guardians call us mean names?”

“They said you two ought to know better,” Bede recounts, and trims off the excess. “Their words, not mine. Swear on it.”

Gloria laughs; the sound of it like a peal of small bells. “No worries, we believe you. Also, no curry contest tonight. This meal is pungent root free, unfortunately.”

“You need to incorporate more veggies in your diet, Hop,” Bede teases, mitigating the fact that this is a genuine concern. Adults hate to be nagged.

“Ugh. You’re not my mum.”

“D’you want me to be?”

“Don’t encourage him,” Gloria groans. She scrunches the beret with her fists.

The newfound evidence colors her words differently. He won’t be able to fix her hat tonight, but maybe he can muster up the courage to ask tomorrow. Bede wonders how long she’s held a flame for him, then decides that it will hurt less not to wonder about it at all.

* * *

Plaintext Alphabet

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Ciphertext Alphabet

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YMTZLMY XMJ IJXJWAJI ST QJXX YMFS XM J'I LNAJ

BJQQ MFUUD GNWYMIFD

MJW GQTTI'X TS RD MFSIX

NY'X PNSI TK F XMFRJ HFZXJ N INI QNPJ YMFY IWJXX

NY'X KZSSD YMJ YMNSLX YMFY DTZ KNSI NS YMJ WFNS

YMJ YMNSLX YMFY DTZ KNSI

NS YMJ RFQQ FSI NS YMJ IFYJ RNSJX

NS YMJ PSTYX XYNQQ NS MJW MFNW

TS YMJ GZX N'R TS RD BFD ITBS

TS RD BFD ITBS

FQQ YMJ LNWQX XJJR YT GJ YMJWJ

BJ'QQ XJJ MTB GWFAJ DTZ FWJ

BJ'QQ XJJ MTB KFXY DTZ'QQ GJ WZSSNSL

BJ'QQ XJJ MTB GWFAJ DTZ FWJ

BJ'QQ XJJ

* * *

**Log *******

No one in their right mind who’s serious about cryptography would bother with Caesar shift. Basic bitch stuff- but I suppose it has some uses. If you have abusive parents or unsavory roommates, you can write your notes and journal entries with a substitution cipher. If they peek in your journal, they won’t be able to read it, unless they’re as much of a secretive paranoid nerd as you.

I never had to worry about that. Mum’s a normal person. A nice person, even. When Leon rose to his position, she almost couldn’t believe it. Greatness from Sonia, she pretty much expected. There’s that whole “your blood relative is incredible; greatness is inheritance.” 

She calls herself stupid a lot when I come over to visit. “Oh, I can’t get half the stuff you and your brother chat on about. I’m not very bright.”

Mum. For the love of Arceus. FUCKING STOP IT.

**Log *******

She says the empty nest is lonely. She says her only use was being useful, and she doesn’t have that anymore. Says we don’t need her anymore. I don’t know how to tell her that humans aren’t tools. I don’t know how to tell her that you don’t owe the world anything; that what you give to the world is something you give of your own volition.

This world has people who earn in two minutes what coal miners earn in a month. This world has gods that can swallow a continent whole. Mum doesn’t owe the world anything. Mum doesn’t have to give the world anything. Mum can slit someone’s throat and I’d still think she’s right, because that’s just what the world does. Makes you want to cut someone open. Makes you want to plunge it into the Darkest Day, because surely what comes after has a chance to be better than what we had before.

Blank slate. Tabula Rasa. Rose’s weird journals. Ad nauseum.

**Log *******

I get it. I really get it. I want to tell her I understand. When someone says they’re stupid, they think it’s self acceptance, but it also saves them from having to try, because when you try and have your arse handed back to you, you think that it will sting worse than if you never left your house. It’s no use lecturing mum, though. “My sons, they’re so great! How can I top that?”

I think I should get her a painting set. She used to do oils but she stopped when Leon was born because of the fumes. I know nothing about oil paints. Would she do fine with oil pastels?

**Log *******

Watching her work with a bunch of glorified crayons was literally witchcraft. I have the Wooloo sketches hung up in the lab. She begged me not to hang it up. Said she can do better.

Sorry Mum. 

**Log *******

Bede gave me JPG scans of Rose’s journal - 84 pages worth, in double page spreads. I know it means a lot to him, so he must have a good deal of trust in me to send them over.

I’m going to squander his goodwill. Somehow I always do.

**Log *******

Mum would love these drawings. I had no idea Rose even did anything besides uh… run a company and do press conferences. Too bad I can’t show them to her.

It's not fun to think about how much she's given up, it's not nice to think about how much about her i don't know, that she faded like an old photograph when she popped us out and she did it willingly, i don't like to think about that if i can help it

i hate it i hate it i hate it

* * *

Three of them huddle together in Hop’s tent. All nonhuman parties have either returned to their balls, shuffled to the two remaining tents to huddle in warm piles and rest, or in Zacian and Zamazenta’s case, gone off to tend to private affairs to return in the morning. They lay on imported camping pillows (Swablu feather, infinitely compatible, impossibly soft ™), with Bede at the center. From behind them, the very sleepy Rotom in Gloria’s phone projects a screen at the foot end of the tent, illuminating the emptiness with a dim patch of light.

“The thing about this documentary,” she starts, a smile in her voice, “is that Leon is obsessed with it. He watches it over and over in his spare time. It’s shot in that slightly pretentious art house way that was trendy back then. The soundtrack is vintage Piers, and it comes creeping from behind random historical facts. You would hear Professor Magnolia droning on about Anna Anderson being groomed into repeating a lie, and then his pianos would suddenly come out from underneath you.”

Hop finds his hand behind Bede’s hair, and twirls the curls there. He sighs as he speaks, as though his energy is fading by the second. “Oh. We’re watching _that,_ tonight? Leon funded this documentary, but it was Sonia’s pet project. She used to be obsessed about the Romanov murders, and the royal family impostors that came afterwards. It was kind of her historical fixation as a child.”

A beat. Three.

“Bro binges this when he's depressed.”

Gloria whistles. “Ah.”

Bede says nothing. This peace is temporary, but not unwelcome. The movie starts late into the night, and he is so tired that he spends most of it with half eyes closed, absorbing information in half snatches. Piers croons; the refined knife that is his voice is rawer and younger in a way that he dares not show anymore. What a strange lesson to learn with age- _most people are not worth your vulnerability._

_“I know what you want, the magpies have come. If you know me so well, then tell me which hand I use.”_

Shit.

He’s heard this before.

Bede overturns the castle in his memory; counting and recounting mugs; breaking plates, tearing open cabinets. He’s heard this song before. Where has he heard this song before? Years before the documentary’s publishing date. He pulls out couch cushions to dig out lost coins. He tears open fabric to claw at stuffing. There’s nothing there that resembles this song. He’s heard this before, he swears, he swears. He can’t find it. He doesn’t understand why it upsets him so terribly not to find it.

“So,” Hop yawns, his voice taking a tutorial’s edge to it. “Their argument is if Anna Anderson manipulated these people, or if she herself was manipulated into believing she was the lost princess. She tossed out her old identity entirely. There’s no glamour to being a factory worker in the old war. It was easy to dump to the wayside.”

 _“We’ll see how brave you are,”_ Piers threatens the audience watching an otherwise dry historical recitation. _“We’ll see how fast you’ll be running.”_

Gloria takes Bede’s hand from under the sheets, as though a second sense had known his palms to be trembling. “Isn’t that sad, though? Before they found her, she was in a mental institution. She probably took the first out that people handed over to her. Can you really fault her for that?”

(Prince Frederick killed all the 60 cat pokemon in her property, and her Boltund. She had to flee to Unova.)

Why would the song be in the stuffing? Why would the song be under the bed? Has the song left the castle?

_“Thought I’d been through this in 1919, counting the tears of ten thousand men. Gathered them all, but my feet are slipping. There’s something we left on the windowsill, there’s something we left, yes-”_

Bede’s eyes droop.

_We’ll see how brave you are._

_We’ll see how fast you’ll be running._

_BJ'QQ XJJ MTB GWFAJ DTZ FWJ_

_BJ'QQ XJJ_

“Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

“Ha. Well, fuck. Why do I even bother anymore.”

“I’m not- I’m not going to pursue it. It’s better this way.”

“Thank you so much for the pity. Very kind of you. How magnanimous of the champion-”

“-Hop, you’re an absolute tool. You know that, right?”

“Did you like me better when I was a simpering ten year old? Everyone liked me better as a simpering ten year old except him. He saw who I really was under all the shellac I coat over myself and decided that he still wanted to take it.”

“And you think that's special? He hates veneers. He does that with everybody willing or stupid enough to show him.”

“Gloria.”

“What.”

“Maybe a gesture like that is worthless to you, but it means a lot to me.”

“...I never said it was worthless.”

* * *

Bede is first to sleep and first to wake. The morning sky glows dawn pink, with yellow clouds that drift in gentle procession. He forages bare berry branches for unattended eggs, and fries them into a huge omelet with wild greens, to be cut into sections. Pokemon wake at the scent, and crowd around the fire. Hop, bless his heart, has not made any effort to learn anything more complicated than pasta and rice with a premade packet dumped over it (Min-max INT with WIS as a dump stat, as Marnie put it when she still had free time). His team’s fascination with Bede’s offering says it all.

Their humans are second last to come to the fire. Even Zacian and Zamazenta arrive before them, wolfing down fried eggs like a new delicacy. Eternatus is last and leaves his ball without ceremony, with his enormous head pointed skywards, as though listening for something. Glora frowns at this, unable to enjoy breakfast.

“Hey. Ishmael,” she says warily. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s missing out on amazing eggs,” Hop manages in between helpings.

The air thins. Bede’s nose itches with the raw burn of fire and metal, and he feels rather than knows what is coming. Zamazenta is quick on the delivery, immediately launching skywards, but even a god’s intercession comes late. Ishmael opens his mouth to tear at the sky, leaving a black crack in an otherwise flawless canopy of blue. He leaves through the hole. Gloria howls, falling to her knees as though gutted, and Hop rushes to hold her, gaze transfixed on the rapidly re-knitting sky.

“Shit,” Bede breathes, frozen in place.

His phone blares, as though on cue.

Milo’s face fizzles to light, fear and terror barely contained in so small a rectangle. “MY NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE TURNED INTO A CASTLE. MY- MY NEIGHBOR- THE- THE CASTLE- MY NEIGHBOR WHO’S A DEAD RINGER FOR ALEX ROSE’S RESUSCITATED CORPSE, HE LIVES ALONE-- IT’S A BLOODY FUCKING CASTLE NOW!!!!!! A FUCKING CASTLE- THERE’S BIRDS EVERYWHERE, TOO!!! MILLIONS OF THEM! INTERPOL’S SWARMING THE PLACE---”

Bede watches Hop and Gloria’s faces contort as though they are seeing what Milo is seeing, and he tries to imagine what they see. A glowing raid den, most likely, transformed by magenta mist and blanketed by birds. The Champion of Galar and Galar’s Smartest Man mount their respective dogs, but Bede hesitates. He does not see what they see. He sees crowds gathered around a fair distance away, cameras pointed at the sight, and Darkest Day cultists walking in broad daylight, prostrating themselves on winter grass.

All he sees is a house. At the center of the commotion is a cottage by a small stream, with a figure sitting close to the door, small and pale haired. A red skirt billows. Oleana surveys the crowd. She rakes nails against the crushed velvet pillowing in her lap.

She, more likely than not, also sees a house. He feels rather than knows this. He does not understand why he thinks he knows.

 _ROSE IS ALIVE,_ a voice inside him hollers; shouting until it is hoarse. _ROSE IS ALIVE AND HE DIDN’T EVEN VISIT YOU TO SAY SORRY THE GALL OF HIM THE NERVE OF THIS RAT BASTARD-_

Bede gets on Zamazenta anyway, arms linked tightly around Hop’s waist. The joyride is uneventful, considering their circumstances. Dismount is far more eventful than the ride- press and laymen alike immediately swarm them like plague locusts. The dogs howl to part them; animal-like and aggressive, more monster than god. Bede stays close to the both of them. At the back of his head, he registers hands clenching either of his wrists, chaining him to Hop and Gloria as they weave through the throng to penetrate the heart of the castle.

 _House._ All he sees is a house. Hop spouts some factoids to make sense of the situation that Bede doesn't even try to digest. blah blah smoke cloud blah blah Eternamax blah blah locking the place blah blah pierce the veil you don’t see a house? _i see a house why why why why don’t you see a house??? It’s just a house._

“Eternatus is trying to fuse with him,” Bede whispers. He doesn’t know why he knows. For a split second, he swears he can see a beach instead of a house. The sea shivers like an unwanted touch, bright red and gleaming. A wound slowly opens. Two figures walk the stretch of pale sand- one small and one immeasurably large. 

“Eter- _Ishmael_ is trying to fuse with Rose.”

Gloria makes a strangled, distressed noise. Hop hisses under his breath.

Don’t adventures stop when you pass the age threshold? This isn’t fair to them. They’ve paid their share ten times over already.

“I don’t see a castle,” Bede says at last, because he can’t count the scars they tuck under their clothes, and at least he can be useful, if not special. They’d do the same for him. That much, he knows. That much, he thinks he knows. “I’m going inside.”

He yanks away from their hold and ignores their cries for him to return, breaking off into a run. 

* * *

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Oleana says gently. The skin under her eyes has rubbed raw with recent tears. “Can you open the door? It’s locked.”

Bede shrugs. He is the opposite of calm, but decorum always comes before despair, especially in front of Oleana. Decorum is all he has left these days.

“It’s uh. It’s been a while since I’ve picked a lock. If all else fails, we’ll have to force it open.”

She crinkles her nose. He holds back the urge to mock her for crinkling her nose.

“Ugh. Well, if you must.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is shorter than most of the other recent ones, but it is also the fanfic equivalent of an author parking a hot car and leaving the characters and readers strapped inside, so in this case maybe brevity is better (???????)
> 
> The cipher text is- you guessed it. Caesar shift with a right shift of five, including the title.


	10. Ishmael, the Weeping Sentinel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They traverse the receiving end of the mirror.

Call me ▒▒ ▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒ ▓▓ ▒▓ ▒ ▒▓▒▒. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely-

_ 20,000 years ago at the tail end of the Pleistocene era, I fell. Not without trying, of course, but you would be surprised at how so much of the universe is empty space. Dark swaths of emptiness without stars to consume- it stretches forever, and forever is even longer when you’re famished. If I must scrounge up an equivalent, imagine a human without weapons or beast of burdens in a desert, but the desert takes up most of the world. The desert  _ **_is_ ** _ the world. _

_ In this level of scarcity, if you run into something living, your first instinct is to eat them.  _

_ My kind hold stars in their teeth and burn through planets like kindling, and when we grow too large to maintain our mass, we shed off the offending pieces. 20,000 years is a fingernail scratch in time’s wall to me, and the bulk of it makes an empty shape. Consume. Discard. Consume. Your detritus makes new monsters. Your detritus makes new planets. You run into something that looks like you and you hold each other with teeth to survive. Discard. Discard. _

_ You’re starving. You're always starving. _

_ At some point I stopped eating. _

▒▒▒ ▒▓ ▓ ▓▒▓▓ ▒▓

Locksmith was Bede’s intended fallback, or any other reliable trade that won’t dry out with technological innovation. He’s seen enough kids ousted from the foster system at eighteen, directionless and alone, to know the values of planning early. By the age of eleven, he was useful seven years before he was required to be, collecting wishing pieces for Oleana. Ending up a gym leader, of all things, did not align with his intended path.

A fortunate fluke, but still a fluke. Plumber ranks higher in probabilities.

He kneels in front of the door to reach eye level with the lock, and removes the picks from his bag- a holiday gift from Hop that he never planned on using, let alone using to break into Rose’s house. It boasts shed Duraludon claws for the discriminating lock picker, housed in vegan leather. It cost Bede nothing but volunteering a piece of himself he didn’t anticipate volunteering.

_ Whatever.  _ ▒  _ Pieces grow back. _

▒▒▒ ▒▓ ▓ ▓▒▓▓ ▒▓

_ Consume. Discard. Consume. Your detritus- _

_ Satya,  _ ▒  _ a blanket of stars for your corpse _

_ i don’t want you do die by the stream or the sea _

_ you’ve damned me you’ve damned me _

_ i wish i never knew what love  _ ▒  _ is  _ ▒▒

  
  


Oleana hovers behind him to watch, and Bede cannot help but roll his eyes. 

“You owe me,” he says with clenched teeth. “You and Rose both owe me. Why are we the only ones who see a house?”

An audible exhale of breath. He turns in time to see the woman reach out her hand towards him, only to pull it back, as though burned. Further behind her, rolling meadows change shape. Like a layer of colored plastic over wrapped flowers, diaphanous castle walls blanket Turrfield’s green fields. Cultist mourners wail at the periphery; a horizon fills with the bright snap of reporter cameras, phones with cameras, and the fluorescent, opera pink glow of Dynamax fog. Hop and Gloria fight through hallways and chambers filled with holy and unholy objects. Golden Corviknights swarm the pair in droves.

“You don’t know?” Oleana remarks, soft like an apology, or a warning. “Of course you see a house. You’re one of the few people he’d want inside.”

Bede turns his head away. He leaves half of his healing items by the door, and Oleana does not question him. 

Four clicks. He forces the door open. “Conflicting hard light projections. Shrodinger's castle. Got it. Who else sees a house?”

Grandma furniture. Grandma lace. Heavy blue curtains. A blanket with an intricately woven image of a Copperajah in a forest, tossed carelessly on a corduroy couch. Tiny, postcard sized paintings of flowers and bird pokemon litter the wooden coffee table. Bede, unable to help himself, takes one and holds it to eye level. A gentle Pidove rests its legs on a flowering branch, mouth open in mid song.

“Leon, most likely,” Oleana volunteers without ceremony. “One of the employees at the Neptune diner in Motostoke who’s known him since he was six. Opal, definitely. Besides that, I’m not sure.”

Bede drops the card. It falls to the carpet soundlessly.

“Some children have to worry about parents taking all of their earnings from their pokemon journeys. Opal has a service where she holds funds for vulnerable minors and returns it to them with interest when they’re of age, and Rose used this service when he was younger.”

Oleana lingers by three watercolor tubes and a porcelain tray of dried, mixed colors at the opposite end of the table. Her fingers find the yellow, and she reads the label before putting it back down.

_ I know that, _ Bede doesn’t bother saying. 

_ I don’t want to think about how much Rose has in common with me,  _ is what he means, but also doesn’t say.

“Eternatus wants to fuse with him,” Bede supplies, clipped and clinical.

Oleana’s fists clench and unclench. Her mouth hardens to an unpunctuated line. She picks up the fallen pidove and returns it to its place on the table. “I’m not too surprised, somehow. Come with me. He’s likely in bed upstairs.”

Bede lags behind the woman, but does as he is told. Not the first time. Potentially the last, depending on luck or lack thereof. He pockets the painting of the singing bird while her back is turned away, as down payment. 

(What would they find when they get there? What could they even do? Wait for Hop and Gloria to arrive to put the damn chimera down?)

At the head of the stairs, Oleana freezes, as though deliberating. A narrow hallway spills hazy red light from open curtains. Three doors line the opposite wall, illuminated by an alien glow. Bede makes no effort to move from his spot while her shoulders tremble. She shakes her head slowly, and raises an arm to swipe at tears.

“He didn’t know you were collecting wishing stars for me,” she almost whispers, as though the lowered volume would soften the sting. “I thought his plan to wake Eternatus was crazy talk. The star pieces should have been enough to hold over an energy crisis for another century or two, and that’s not without the possibility that I could have eventually managed to reverse engineer them in a laboratory. There was already some of that in the works-”

“-Cool motive,” Bede deadpans, and storms toward the first door.

“Bathroom. Bedroom’s the middle one.”

“Thanks. Noted, in case I decide to break in again.”

Oleana scoffs, but the pain remains in her face, like a permanent mark that can only be removed by solvents.

“What did I tell you? You won’t need to break in. He’d let you inside.”

Also locked. As expected. Bede groans behind a clenched mouth, and pulls his Rapidash off from the harness. The pokemon whinnies anxiously in the closed, strange space; he immediately holds a hand over his mane to smooth down anxiety. Oleana frowns, deep and disapproving.

“You have more than enough money to fix a door,” he helpfully elucidates, and steps aside to make room. “Big Boss, ram it.”

Old wood splinters like discount confetti. Boss immediately returns to the safety of his ball. They make their way inside the pink-red stained room, unremarkable in its outdated furniture; remarkable in its almost suffocating cellophane veneer of magenta, like saturation turned up too high in a digital photo. Rose’s bed rests flush against a corner, the head of it facing the window. A bundle of dead wildflowers tied in blue ribbon lays by the nightstand, along with a set of four colored pencils and a closed, leather bound book. Huddled close to the wall is a body, back facing his uninvited guests. Watery pastels and faded neutrals hang over his frame like loose, unflattering rice sacks, with most of its contents having long been emptied.

Rose is much smaller than Bede remembers. It makes his breath hitch; stopping dead in its tracks in his throat. He steps forward despite this, while Oleana lingers closer to the door.

“DO NOT INTERFERE,” a voice demands, and the boom of it knocks both of them down to the floorboards, their bodies entirely enveloped by its sting. It comes from everywhere and nowhere. It lingers like stickiness behind the teeth; behind crevices Bede can’t even begin to reach. “PLEASE, PLEASE. DO NOT INTERFERE. I BEG OF YOU.”

“We’re here to help!” Oleana half yells and half cries, nails raking at the floor for purchase. “Just let me near him- just let me-”

Bede doesn’t know whether this is the truth. With great difficulty, he crawls towards the body.

“DO NOT INTERFERE. PLEASE. DO NOT INTERFERE. I DO NOT WANT HIM TO DIE. I DO NOT WANT HIM TO DIE!!! SATYA, YOU IDIOT, SHITE FOR BRAINS-”

Water floods Bede’s eyes without warning.  _ Rookidees take your eyes,  _ says a voice inside his head, grave and unfamiliar. Water floods his lungs, too, or at least, it certainly feels like water is flooding his lungs- tasting strongly of salt, copper, and ozone. The floor shakes and trembles in a steady rhythm, further amplifying the task’s difficulty. Distantly, irrationally, Bede likens it to a beating heart.

They’re in the ▒heart.

▒They’re in▒ the monster’s heart.

They’re-

The veneer crumbles. Ishmael’s ▒antwerp blue▒ ribs jail three bodies like a bird cage. Vertigo sets in as both house and castle disappear from Bede’s vision; the former reduced to a ravaged pile of splinters below. His feet leave the ground and gravity fails them all, suspending them hundreds of meters above the air in a massive constriction of red light. Hop, Gloria, and Leon pound at Ishmael with visibly haggard teams, like children throwing stones at the guns of soldiers in procession. Further behind them, the entire population of Turrfield, with extra guests, release all manners of pokemon to counter the monster and its entourage of birds.

“Please. Don’t interfere,” Ishmael begs, and his voice shrinks into something that almost sounds human. “I don’t want him to die. If I make him part of me, he won’t have to.”

Oleana sobs, clinging hopelessly to Rose’s breathless body. Bede wants to understand. He thinks he does, but he’s more than likely to be wrong. The tiny blue dot that is Hop holds the tiny red dot that is Gloria, both struggling and fatigued under his sky suspended body. Mentally, Bede swaps them over two adults who have only complicated his life, and somehow it makes things both easier and harder to digest.

“If you do,” Bede proposes, taking life and death on a lark, “would you leave my friends alone? Would you leave Galar alone?”

“I never intended to cause pain. I never intended to cause harm.” Ishmael’s plea breaks and cracks, spilling fissures in the red wrapping. He sounds like Rose now, though his intonation is harsher around the edges, and the Rose that Bede knows would sooner hide than show vulnerability.

“You don’t think of all the ants you step on when you run errands. You didn’t consider the nests you trampled in the grass when you ventured here.” The monster howls like an animal caught in a metal trap; like a human whose child is dying. “The time I’ve spent here is a speck of dust in a pile of stones, but your world magnifies suffering and joy alike and crams it into impossibly smaller and smaller spaces. Temporal. Geographical. Emotional. I loathe it. I spent so much of my stranding asleep to avoid the plague of its contagion, but it found me anyway.”

_ Fighting words for a poison type,  _ Bede thinks. He holds his breath. “Drop me and Oleana on the ground and merge with him then, but you need to stop causing damage.”

“BEDE, NO!” she shouts, but they are already falling.

▒ ▒ ▒ ▓▓▓ ▒ ▒ ▒

_ Time dilation occurs in dreams, to a limited extent. Your yamper licks your face while you sleep, and you dream of riding in a swan boat. I anticipated some form of mental time dilation during the merger- potentially a human life span's worth. Specifically, thirty-eight or fifty three years, give or take a few months. _

_ He is fourteen and buying a set of index cards from a discount store. I am fourteen and buying a set of index cards from a discount store. They only have lined packets available. I am angry at this minor setback, but pay with a polite smile to the cashier. She is blond and in her early forties, and speaks with lingering remains of an Unovan accent. She tells him to study hard. _

_ Satya walks half a mile to the nearest library. On Thursdays, they close at seven at night. He can get home after eight. My mother works until 11 tonight, and my father doesn't care how long I stay out. If I can nearly beat the champion at the age of ten, I can protect myself from strangers. _

_ A girl from art class is giving me her mom's painting supplies in exchange for doing her art homework- one gift for every good grade. She's guaranteed an internship at Macro Cosmos once she's old enough. It would do well to stay on her good side.  _

_ I paint a pomegranate on the back of an index card. I paint twelve pomegranates at slightly different angles. I will spend all twelve months buried with the god of death, because unlike Demeter, my mother does not want me. _

_ He is seventeen and gently declines the rich girl's advances. A week later, she abandons the internship. _

_ I am twenty nine and horrified that Oleana is taking a shine to me. He used to buy her yellow blouses. I used to buy her weird pink novelty erasers in the shape of cupcakes. _

_ You are older than a thousand black holes paraded in a line. This speck of dust, this scratch of a mortal nail, feels longer than all those eons combined. _

_ I knew I loved you when you read me the story about the sailor, and you thought you were alone, so you talked about your father. I wanted to hold you, but you were much too small. _

_ I don't know why I love you. Humans are repulsive and irrational. They create language to speak, and the language obfuscates instead of elucidates. You communicate messages in fifty words of concepts easily said in five. You use words to cram lies into truths. _

_ Maybe I love you because you are aware that you are repulsive and irrational. Maybe I love you because I see yourself in me, but that makes it narcissism instead of love, and those two are not the same. Those two are not interchangeable. _

_ A youth drowns attempting to kiss his reflection in the water. Hulbury’s sunset tints the sky with his blood. He doesn’t know what love is, and neither do you. It doesn't matter. It's close enough and solid enough to hold on to. _

_ Satya, I don't want you to die. _

_ I don't want to die. _

_ I don't _

▒ ▒ ▒ ▓▓▓ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▓▓▓ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▒ ▓▓▓ ▒ ▒ ▒

Bede trusts them to catch him, and the people he loves are quick to deliver. Gloria hauls him in her arms, while half mounted, half slung, over Zacian's dust encrusted back. Hop catches Oleana seconds before impact, while Ishmael folds himself into a smaller and smaller space, like a bird cage in its death throes, crushed rapidly in a trash compactor.

_ With a bird still inside, _ Bede notes, and turns his head away. 

Leon does not. Leon sends his Charizard to retrieve a third, arguably human body where Ishmael once was. Like moths drawn to self destruction, they crowd around the new shape, while the commotion dies down. The cloud of red disperses, as do the army of flying, golden sentinels standing guard at castle ruins. Stragglers remain, but they are ordinary and easily subdued by townsfolk.

He wears Rose's clothes. He wears Rose's face and flesh, and nothing in his appearance strikes Bede as extraordinary, save the nails, keratin swapped to a sharp, metallic blue. From up close, he finally understands why the man was so meticulous when it came to facial hair upkeep. Fashion is alteration, to minimize and exaggerate. A clean shave betrays a softer, rounded face, and trims away at least half a decade from Rose's features.

Maybe even more- but that could be Eternatus playing with the default settings. A younger body requires less upkeep. Hop said something about energy conservation. Something about the labs. Something about-

The body rises to a seated position, nearly too correct in form and posture to be human. Its eyes glow a faint, cool red, tinged with sea green at the center. Oleana runs to hold him, and the body holds back. The man's hand gingerly pushes tousled strands away from her forehead.

“I can touch things... and not break them,” the stranger remarks, delicate and deliberate. It almost sounds like Rose, as told by a second rate impersonator, or Rose, with pieces of him destroyed and replaced.

“Ishmael?” Gloria asks desperately, and leans to move towards the figure, but Zacian shields her from inching any further.

Sirens wail like funeral mourners. Ambulances, humans, and pokemon tear through grass to fetch them from the wreckage. Bede thinks of nests low to the ground, trampled by the frantic stampede of feet. He lays down his aching body on the green, and notes, too late, that both he and Oleana are covered in blood that belongs to neither of them.

It rapidly congeals, like a human's. It reeks like one. It dries off in flakes. His eyes find Rose and his mostly spotless pale blue cardigan, blood tinged only where Oleana has held him. 

_ To travel to the other side, the original body must be destroyed, _ a sound clip replays with Professor Hop's made for the telly tutorial affectation. Bede retches over a patch of pink wildflowers while Hop rubs his shoulders, staining his hands with wine red. Dried flower petals run through a paper shredder at the back of his head, rewinds, then repeats in an endless loop. There’s nothing remaining in his stomach to heave out but bile.

Leon buries his face in Rose’s sweater, in the crook between collar and shoulder. Ambulances arrive just as the crimson light begins to fade.

_ In my left fist, a canopy of stars for the pieces of me that died. In my right hand, a darkened sky for my mother and father. But oh, I can hold things now! I can touch things and not break them. I can touch things and not be broken. I can hold anything I need to hold. I can avoid holding things I am afraid to hold. _

_ There’s so many things I am afraid to hold. _

* * *

Professor Hop, Galar’s Current Champion, Galar’s  _ Former  _ Champion, and the Ballonlea Gym Leader spend four days in Wyndon General’s ICU. Investigators, reporters, and other miscellany file in and out of metaphorical revolving doors for the first three, but disperse by the fourth. Chairman Oleana, Bede suspects, has something to do with their exodus.

Overexposure to dangerously high levels of Dynamax energy is the excuse they print on the major news outlets. An unexpected power surge led to unusual projections, the most notable manifesting in a skyscraper castle in sleepy Turrfield that disturbed the flight patterns of local birds. Tie neatly in a silk bow with a soundbite singing praises of local heroism. Group efforts. Unpaid sacrifices. Ad infinitum. Carpe Diem. Carpe Collum.

Bede actively avoids these articles.

Hospital staff were kind enough to house him and his friends in adjacent rooms. They rewatch the Anastasia documentary with Leon this time, and he is all too happy to provide commentary on production trivia. Sonia played a major role in color choices. Piers provided piano and violin without vocals in addition to the titular cover, as well as suggestions on camera direction. 

“I miss them,” Leon notes, a yearning disguised as an afterthought. “Adulthood is calling your friends and repeatedly promising to meet each other, only to rarely ever have time to.”

“There’s video calls,” Hop provides, perched on the edge of the bed with an arm behind Bede’s neck, while Gloria traces lines over pale, calloused palms.

“This says you’re going to make a new friend,” she says with a grin.

“Wait.” Bede rubs his chin. “Really?”

“No. I’m jostling you. Got no clue how to palm read.”

“We do lots of vid chats,” Leon interjects, brows furrowing while Piers hums through mounted telly speakers. “Not the same thing as hugging them in person.” 

Gloria visibly sobers. Already, Bede knows where this is going.

“I hear ya, Leon,” she slowly nods, eyes transfixed on their window view of the midday sun filtering through the trees.

(She’s thinking about Marnie. She must be.)

“It’s never the same.”

Rose and Oleana aren’t in this hospital. Bede suspects that they’re not even in Galar anymore, but that’s not a bridge he intends to burn until long after he’s crossed it.

* * *

_ April 29, xxxx _

_ Dear Bede, _

_ I hope this letter finds you in good health. I cannot repay you enough for what you’ve done for the both of us, let alone to make amends for what we’ve done to you. That being said, you’ll find funds deposited in your account within this week, if it has not posted already. _

_ No doubt, you’ve heard of my resignation from Macro Cosmos. I have some faith that we won’t be found, regardless of whether or not anyone tries to look. Please do not take this as a personal challenge. Satya may not mind you actively searching, but I certainly will. Trust my word that it won’t be worth the hassle. _

_ Enclosed in this box are art supplies and sketchbooks recovered from the late Mrs. Rose’s home- Satya’s estranged mother. She had them stored in a box in her bedroom before she passed last month. You are free to do with these as you wish- I have included a separate list of recommended charities to donate them to, should you decide on that. _

_ For Professor’s Hop’s professional curiosity, I have attached records of written and photographed observations prepared for him, spanning 90 days. Satya has consented to these records. It is my personal opinion that these findings are dangerous, should they be presented to the greater public, and I have no doubt that Hop will be inclined to agree. _

_ The third container is for Opal. Its contents will only be stable for two more months. Please send it over promptly.  _

_ All the best, _

_ Oleana _

  
  



	11. I need to tell you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a giant TW for discussion of child abuse and child neglect, including CSA.

He finds her perched on his apartment steps; head bowed in folds of a mud caked dress. It’s not one of the neighbor’s kids. Department store angels come to mind, no thanks to the young girl's pale hair. Their golden halos and floating robes currently inundate seasonal displays like pesky, ornate flies. Her strands are still clean, shackled neatly behind her in a long, tight braid that reminds him too much of a noose. A Trubbish circles her legs, baring its blunt, seashell teeth as he draws near.

Alex keeps his distance. She raises her head to inspect him; eyes like a surgical blade. Dissecting. Dismantlng. Well, fair enough- she’s entitled to it.

“Are you lost, young lady?” he asks with all too much hesitance. Mentally scolding himself, he fumbles in shallow pockets for the company phone. “Do you need to call your parents?”

If she’s here to steal, it’s not going to be on his dime. There’s a good chance she won’t, however, because the face she wears is too familiar. He’s worn it too. He’s donned it enough to spot it in dim light; to hunt it down in strangers and acquaintances at parties. Peel off veneers of dead eyed grins, or distracting brand named clothes, and he’ll still find their uniform with his hands tied behind him.

“No,” says the girl, curt and self possessed. She tugs at her sleeves, pulling at scant fabric as autumn's evening breeze makes torturous rounds through their bodies. Alex strips off his cardigan and drapes it over her, and she does not flinch. Her guardian pokemon relaxes its stance, though its glare remains wary. 

Strange. He smells seawater instead of garbage.

A smile forms on her mouth, knifelike as she leans forward. “Say. Mind if I stay the night?”

“Uh.”

Alex feels his jaw slack; temporarily rendered a visitor rather than an inhabitant of his own body. Wooloo blend sleeves hang like elephant ears over the stranger's bone starved arms. The girl covers her mouth with this spare fabric, almost but not quite apologetic. She drowns in an excess of dark blue stitches, and together they swallow the silence between them, rising like ocean water between the ears. 

Should he call the authorities?

“Don’t,” demands the girl before he can start to speak, raising her palms like a stop sign. “Don’t call anyone. You’re not going to help me if you do. I’m not lost. My mum’s shooting up with a single serve boyfriend right now. It’s just safer outside when she invites someone into the flat.”

She glares at his phone- more glorified fidget device at this point. Alex pockets it at once. 

“Can I stay the night?” she repeats, blunter this time. Her eyes turn overcast with an umbra that feels rote. “You seem nice enough. I can make it worth your while-”

“-No,” Alex spits. He shakes his head with a viciousness that nears convulsions. The girl gawks at him, thin lipped with tightly crossed arms. “No. No, no no. You’re not paying me.”

“Nice guy,” she deadpans. “Trust fund kid lookin' bloke. Don’t even look old enough to own your own flat. You must want _something_.”

_(I spend mornings in the mines and afternoons in a shitty internship while cramming distance learning classes on company time. I’m using three of the unused conference rooms to mine Meowth Coin. Where did you learn the phrase “worth your while?” Your parents need to have their front teeth liberated from their mouth with pliers. The pliers are in a tool box under the kitchen sink-)_

His hands tremble while he rakes through his messenger bag for keys, taking a detour to fish out an uneaten burger to shove into the new guest’s hands. 

“I want you to STOP talking.” A wholly inappropriate response, Alex notes too late. This entire sequence of events is inappropriate and yet shows no signs of stopping, trailing off tracks like a crashing light rail. “Sorry. You can sleep on the couch. Please don't touch me.”

“Oleana.”  
  
_“What.”_

“That’s my name.”

Girl- now Oleana peels open the parchment wrap and nibbles at lukewarm bread; pausing at intervals to feed onions, pickles, and other undesirables to the Trubbish. Her footfalls trail behind him through three flights of stairs with an eerie, recognizable lightness of a child trained to be neither heard or seen.

He's worn that too. _Well,_ says a voice in his head, cruel and repulsive. _At least she’s not here to steal. Not that there's much to take._

“...Alex.”

His studio leans on the small and sparse side. Like many other young professionals trapped in glorified tin can apartments, the general consensus is to occupy space vertically. Alex opted for a raised loft bed with a small couch and desk setup underneath, leaving breathing room for a rickety wooden dining table and two mismatched chairs close to the kitchenette. 

“Shirt drawer's the second cube stack,” he drones, pointing to a dark shelf wedged in the small space between the loft bed and a window facing the nearby playground. “Spare towels and blankets are on the bottom shelf. Don't take too long in the shower. My water bill is at extortion prices.”

“How long can I stay?”

Alex avoids facing her, and pretends to be preoccupied with his tea drawer. “Don't you have school?”

“It's called truancy,” Oleana quips. She is quick to decide on a magenta tie dye shirt with dissonant lime splashes, and flashes it to her docile little garbage bag. Their odd, pearlescent molars gnash in delight. 

“Dolores says I have great taste.”

“Uh- sure.”

A beat. Her hands reach towards him, only to return to her sides as a delayed reminder.

“Thank you.”

He waves it off. “I meant what I said about the water bill.”

She spends seven minutes running the shower with the Trubbish in tow, and an additional four minutes and counting biding her time behind the door. Alex boils milk on the stove top in the meantime, measuring distance with a kitchen timer. 

There's stories of strict mothers preparing haldi doodh for their feverish children- a utilitarian, undiluted sort instead of the bastard western cousin Alex prefers. Turmeric is more palatable when dressed to the nines in cinnamon, honey, and milk foam. He doesn't know the former, anyway, except in daydreams and late night wish fulfillment scenarios.

On the fifteen minute mark, Oleana returns with Dolores in her arms. Her damp hair falls in limp waves behind her shoulders, leaving water stains over the knee length shirt. She seats herself on the small couch under the loft bed, and folds his cardigan into a second makeshift pillow to tuck underneath an embroidered throw.

“Is that eggnog?”

“No.”

“Can I have some? Don’t got alcohol in it, right?”

What a turn of events. For the time being, he’s the mother doling out haldi doodh. Oleana accepts the offered mug without scrunching her nose, and sips slowly. Dolores rubs at his ankles and makes a noise resembling a purr.

“You should tell a teacher,” Alex starts, swallowing behind his teeth his own reluctance to tell a teacher back then. “They can have child protective services involved.”

“They check in once in a while,” she recounts while rolling her shoulders, pausing to breathe in. “As long as I’m fed. No willing relatives to dump me over to.”

“Guess it hasn’t changed that much since I was a kid,” he says, careful to not let his face fall. 

Oleana stares him down. Alex stirs his cup with unnecessary intensity.

“So you’re like me,” she posits, while he debates denying or confirming the claim. “Only you managed to leave.”

  
  


* * *

_So you’re like me._

_SO YOU’RE LIKE ME._

**_SO YOU’RE LIKE ME._ **

* * *

They pack them in separate ambulances. Satya goes missing. 

Oleana declines interviews and interrogations without a lawyer. They’ll question the kids. Oleana refuses to make small talk with nurses. They’ll question his neighbors too, and she lacks time to craft a story that fits. Oleana hugs her knees when alone. International Police is already poking their noses at the flattened remains of the Turrfield cottage. Oleana yanks out the IV tube in a fit of white hot implosion and wrings her hair in fistfuls.

_(It’s a myth that the human body’s cells are replaced every seven years. Regeneration time varies between parts. Skin cells shed almost constantly every few days. Skeletons last roughly a decade. Brain cells don’t regenerate as a person grows-)_

Is Satya still in there, anymore? The Satya she knows would risk job termination to steal a scholarship for her, and skip meals to keep her fed, but consistently draws the line at something so ordinary as an embrace. His arms held all the signs of a fever dream sealed in blood. 

_Maybe it’s like eating a banana,_ Oleana muses with even-handed desperation. _The banana is Eternatus. When I meet him again, he’ll still be the same._

The sun winks out, dappled through half-mast hospital blinds. Its afterglow reminds her of the compact paint set permanently stationed on the desk of his shitty flat, back when Alex moonlighted as a teen mum. 

She squeezes her eyes shut, and imagines herself smaller, swaddled in an oversize blue cardigan. She’s too old to play pretend.

“When I meet him again, he’ll be willing to forgive me.”

* * *

> ` _--can I sleep over for the weekend? bringing my homework_ `
> 
> ` i am going to lose my damn marbles and scream at your mum in the street one day `
> 
> ` _--lol then I won’t be able to crash at your place_ `
> 
> ` replaced the old couch with one that has a fold out bed.  
>  Eat on it if you want just vacuum your crumbs in the morning like you usually do `
> 
> ` _--thanks mummy dearest_ `
> 
> ` maybe actually do your homework this time`
> 
> ` _--you're asking for too much_ `
> 
> `what if I bribe you with food? `
> 
> ` _--real ruthless businessman hours_ `

* * *

  
  


“Study sleepover with my friend,” Oleana calls out in the general direction of the living room. “I'll be there all weekend, mum. Packed everything.”

It's not entirely a lie. Alex is a friend and will likely tell her to study. The lady who worked at the library was a friend too, before she got sick and moved away. A vacationing instructor who taught a seasonal comics course at the community centre indeed came from an art class, just not the one in Oleana's school.

“Have fun, Ollie.” Her mum waves a hand without turning away from the thin light of the telly. Ribbons of smoke wash over the room.

Oleana balls her fists, but says nothing. She wants the woman to ask her to double check if there's anything missing in her rucksack _. Did you bring your deodorant? Did you pack enough underwear? Don't forget your bath towel! Call me if you need anything!_

Mums in serials do that all the time. That's how it's supposed to work, right?

“Ollie, I have a guest coming over soon. Could you hurry it up?”

Dolores is much better at gauging the helpfulness of strangers than her mother is.

“Don't worry about me!” She chirps, hand already at the door knob. “I didn't forget my bath towel!”

“You rude, ungrateful girl-” the woman starts, but Oleana is quick to slam the door and run. 

It's fine. It's fine. She's going to Alex's house. She'll forget all about this as soon as he makes dinner. The food's always good there. He might even be adventurous and bake tonight. Mum can’t cook her way out of a paper bag. Mum ought to be ashamed to be beaten out in capability by a university kid over a decade her junior.

Two mile walk; tolerable enough in early spring weather. Dolores coos in anticipation of sumptuous leftovers, and Oleana can’t help but laugh with her. Mum’s face fades into white noise. She imagines the woman tripping and falling down the front stairs; brain matter rearranged into the pavement like tomato chutney.

(Rude, ungrateful girl.)

“I hope he makes that potato thing again,” she says to her Trubbish, who nods in excitement. “The potato dumplings with the cheese inside! With the… with the- what was that sauce called?”

_(Dolores, am I a bad person for wishing bad things on someone else? Is it bad to wish bad things on your mum? Am I really a rude, ungrateful girl like she says?)_

Dolores is an excellent judge of character. She would know that Alex doesn’t have a long game like mum’s ex. He’s not going to spend a few months to win her trust only to betray her when the lights are dim, and her mother won’t side with him instead of her own daughter and-

Alex frowns at her when he answers the door. She holds Dolores tighter.

“Oleana, you really should still be wearing a sweater outside,” he explains, and rummages the closet for a spare hoodie to wrap over her shoulders. “The chill’s not entirely gone yet.”

_(Ah.)_

“I remembered my bath towel this time,” she supplies with little inflection, hefting her rucksack onto one of the dining chairs.

Dolores nudges Alex’s foot. He pats her with a smile while browsing his phone with a free hand. “Not dinner time yet, kid. Sorry. Oh, and Ole, I bought spares just in case. Don’t worry about it too much.”

Her eyes take silent stock of the studio apartment, altered little by little in her duration of her occupancy. Three of her paintings hang above the wooden dining table, plastic sheathed in utilitarian black frames. Her novice attempts at origami flowers decorate the fridge, stuck to the off white doors with double-sided tape. Most notable is the recently mentioned fold-out bed, festooned with peach-pink sheets and flat, twin pillows shaped like Munnas. 

She runs careful hands over pastel faux fur. It feels like she’s swallowed a stone. 

“Are they too childish for you?” Alex asks, apologetic. “I know you like pink, but you’re turning fourteen soon. I’ll return them if you don’t like it.”

“It’s not that,” Oleana mumbles, words like an ocean pebble attempting to speak. She holds one of the pillows in her arms, and buries her face into the fabric.

“Oleana,” Alex starts, but makes no motion to hold her. His voice cracks; softens like erosion on stone cliffs. Wears off the steel and files down their flakes. “Oleana, please don’t cry.”

This is his weak point. She wants to hate him for it; she wishes she could hate him for it. This miserable twenty year old on a shoestring budget is better at mothering than her mother, but he doesn’t know what a hug is. He’ll memorize her school schedule and which one of her grades needs upkeep, but touching her is tantamount to heresy.

“Actually, it’s okay,” he says with delicateness, closing the distance to take hold of her hand- but no further. “You can cry if you need to here.”

“Mum says you have to fight away sad feelings,” she mutters into Munna's belly. “Mum says I’m too old to act like a baby.”

Dolores growls at the mention of the woman. Alex jerks his head at the sound, and makes a face that Oleana can’t read. 

_(He has a lot of those.)_

“This isn’t your mum’s house. You can cry here. You can cry while I make dinner. Just drink some water to make up for the water you lost.”

“...I fucked up your pillows.”

He holds a filled glass in front of her, which she readily takes. 

“They’re laundry safe. You’re getting potato dumplings for dinner. You like them with cheese, right?” 

* * *

In the morning, a woman brings Oleana runny scrambled eggs and wilted hotcakes, paired with decaf. The online reviews for this hospital must have exaggerated about the food quality, or employed a nonzero number of paid liars. No pepper packets, either. She scowls. Are the bulk of their patients idiots who think beans on toast qualifies as high cuisine? 

_All that time spent colonizing countries for spices and Galarians have the nerve to use carbs as a topping for carbs,_ as Alex would say. 

After fifteen minutes pushing and plowing deflated curdles with a fork, a man arrives at the doorway of her room with a knock. She raises a brow at his dated, theatrical trench coat, and combs the stranger's face for anything familiar. In his younger years, he might have passed as the philanderer archetype with four lovers, but time chases almost everyone to the ground.

_(Almost everyone-)_

Oleana shovels eggs into her mouth and makes a point to chew loudly.

“Chairman Oleana,” he begins with a brisk nod. “I'm Agent Looker of the International Police. May I have a few minutes of your time?”

“Of course,” she says with a smile, while tearing open sugar packet after sugar packet to douse over murky coffee. 

“I'll be frank. This event falls in the gray area of our jurisdiction-”

  
  


_(One of the Munna pillows traveled with her to boarding school, and later uni, while the spare stayed in Alex’s apartment. She wrote her Master’s thesis with the damn thing wedged in her arms. This is a debt he won’t allow her to repay. This is a debt she cannot repay.)_

_"--Loved you for so long-"_

_"I’m afraid I can’t- I can’t reciprocate in a way you prefer-"_

_"Do you not- do you not like me? Do you not want me?"_

_"Oleana- ah. Oleana, I used to buy you stuffed animals-"_

_"-And now I schedule your meetings. What can I do to make you want me?"_

_"Oleana, don't. Please, please don’t cry-"_

_(castle, queen side.)_

_YOU WON’T LET ME REPAY YOU YOU WON’T LET ME REPAY YOU WHY WON’T YOU LET ME REPAY YOU I’M DIRTY I’M DIRTY I’M SO DIRTY WHY WON’T YOU LET ME REPAY YOU THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I KNOW HOW TO SHOW IT THIS IS THE ONLY THING MUM SAID I WAS GOOD FOR_

( _check-_ )

  
  


“-legally dead for a while,” Looker continues, poker faced with hands firmly in his pockets. “There’s philosophical arguments to be made when it comes to Sylph Co’s ethically bankrupt containment chamber trials on death and the soul, but in the eyes of the law, Alex Rose is dead.”

Oleana watches steam rise from her coffee, then watches the window. The agent hesitates- she’s tired and beaten and wants to collapse in a fit of weeping on the hospital bed, but protocol still demands that she file this moment of weakness away for safekeeping.

_(Rules for surviving a permanent seat under the Sword of Damocles: save the tears for peacetime. Save the tears for rejection. Save the tears for Satya.)_

“We have the subject in a Kanto lab. He doesn't currently show signs of aggression, though the location is fortified enough to account for behavioral... changes. It’s either you or the current Galar Champion in line for custody, but you’re far more financially equipped to house an anomaly like this.”

_(Castle, king side-)_

“Fine then. Take me to him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EXTRA:  
> [Sketch of late teens to early twenties Satya/Alex](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/172150349912604673/709575183157035121/rosu.png)


	12. My Child, Who is Fearfully Made

1.

 _The highlands and the lowlands,_ _  
_ _Your ghost- where has he gone?_ _  
_ _They’ve peeled away the dragon’s flesh_ _  
_ _And buried you at dawn._

 _You were a shining, gallant thing._ _  
_ _They clamored when you came to town._ _  
_ _Had you survived, would you be king?_ _  
_ _What would you be had you not drowned?_

* * *

In the simulacra of the shoreline, Satya stands alone. The body is old - old in the sense that it’s been years since he’s felt this young; this picked open and emptied. It is also new, and the contrast disorients him. Overhead, a sunrise spills white into a canvas of blue, though the heat does not reach his skin. He shields his eyes, and ventures towards the water. Fish gather by his legs and pick at old scabs. He wades as far as he can go, before the waves carry him.

The water can buoy him forever if it wishes. The empty space between stars had done much of the same before, and for something tenuously named a god, the only resource he had in surplus for eons was time. It stretches on forever like a blanket of dark, barely peppered with the vicious revolutions of planets to consume and destroy.

Ishmael opted to discard most of those memories, dismissing their bulk as redundancies. Rose, by contrast, has snapshots brighter than supernovas; cystallizations of small deaths preserved at peak flame. It has never failed to amuse the monster inside of him how many times humans can die and still live; how many deaths and rebirths they can cram in so small a frame.

There are deaths both mundane and extraordinary. There are deaths given with consent and deaths that are stolen. There are deaths that are ambiguous and deaths that are absolute. Satya does not know what kind of death he is - if he is a death or an invention, or a blurry delineation of the two. 

He picks at their records, though a distance has grown between him and the pieces that died. Time is the easiest distance to cross without effort, and the largest one to travel, but the separation weighs heavier when he watches too closely. If he were still Rose, he’d be content enough to lie and pass off his judgment as the cousin emotion of an adult cringing at embarrassing failures one indulges in as teen. Rose lies as easily as he breathes, by misdirection or omission of the truth. If he were still Ishmael, he would throw an eldritch horror’s equivalent of a depression nap. Ishmael dreams as easily as he ruins, with little to no distinction between either state.

Satya is both, he knows distantly. He is also neither. It is getting harder and harder to make sense of how much of himself is dead and how much of himself is new.

Is he union? Is he offspring? Is he wreckage?

* * *

_“There’s specialists who don’t bother with gyms or challenges, Leon,” Rose echoes. The teenager squirms with fists at his knees, visibly shaken by this new information. “They don’t challenge champions as a courtesy to the general public.”_

_“If they had so much power, why would they bother with hiding?”_

_“To hide is the immediate instinct of someone or something that is immensely powerful. You'll surely learn this when you're older.”_

* * *

  
  


This room has no windows. It is cell-like, which is familiar, with uniform, clinical veneers, which is less so. A padded futon beneath him lays at ground level, bleached white and formless to match the furnishings. The toilet is a hole on the ground that closes and opens with a lever. There is no sink nor shower-head. The wall facing his feet has a dark gray door while the wall opposite of him holds a mirror, flush floor to ceiling like panels in dance studios. 

The holding layout is not the kind they use for humans. This mirror is definitely an observation window.

Satya sits upright and frowns at his reflection. Rose's body glares back; age nineteen to early twenties at most, preserved down to chin length hair, dark under-eye circles, and wiry muscle. It is the Rose who found Oleana on the front steps and worked early shift in the mines, and then late afternoons tidying white collar projects for incompetent superiors. It is the Rose who toiled for a tenth of the pay and none of the credit. If Ishmael chose this form to house their union, it says mountains about his personal preference.

 _As young as you can get me,_ Rose's voice teases. _True to form for gods like you._

Satya crinkles his nose. 

The door opens, spilling light and the outline of two men who appear to be orderlies. His eyes take mental note of their utilitarian gray belts with six pokeballs strapped to the right side; with electric riot sticks latched below the hip via a holster.

All six slots for them both. He's almost flattered. The men rearrange themselves to pull a wheelchair into the room; almost ordinary if not for its lack of cushions and the notable addition of metal straps where his arms and feet would rest. His visitors carry themselves with wide stances and bouncing legs, fingers hovering by their belts in anticipation. 

Satya slowly raises his hands and sits on the chair, keeping his movements slow. They're not getting paid enough to be fodder, and it's common courtesy not to eat strangers. _(Stop it. People don't eat each other. Why eat people when you have better options to choose from? Galar region has slowpoke curry for the love of-)_

Their stances deflate. Satya observes while trying to maintain a neutral expression. The larger of the two men releases a Bewear to hold his knees down and mitigate any unexpected kicks to the face while they strap down his legs. Wholly unnecessary, really, and lethal had Ishmael not removed the human bones to make room for dragon ones.

The creature's nose investigates his hair. ( _You smell strange. Is this a skin you're wearing?)_

Satya clenches his mouth.

 _(Are you a halfling?)_ She presses further. ( _Goodness, we haven't had halflings in centuries! No wonder they're keeping you here. They only keep special ones here. Where are your parents? Do you require assistance? Are they hurting you? Should I try to tell my trainer?)_

_(Ah… um, no, I'm fine. Thank you for your concern. I am here of my own accord.)_

“Looks like she likes you,” mumbles the guard, lips drawn to a thin line. “Sorry Bess. Back in the ball.”

They push the chair through wide hallways of tidy design, over-bright and bone bleached enough to meld into an intangible sameness of pale walls and gray doors. There's a fog between his ears and a hole in his stomach - sub-optimal conditions to take close note of surroundings. 

How many days has it been? He fainted in the ambulance and now he’s here, and the walls remind him of the insides of _containment_ , transmuted to solid mass. Sugar water evaporates on crystal stakes; honey hardens in the cold. Rose and a monster sign a contract to die and be reshaped. Oleana weeps.

Sweat condenses in Satya’s palms. He feels small; impossibly so. Rose discarded smallness but was small once, while Eternatus compacted himself into tinier and tinier confines, so none of this should be traversed like foreign landscapes, but somehow it is still foreign all the same, foreign and open like a scab picked apart. The wound opens. The gyre widens.

Maybe he is the wound. Maybe he is the stranger. He feels less like a union and more like a sore, bashed into the ocean rocks to dry like leftover paint.

“Can you speak?” ventures the man holding the handlebars as reinforced wheels glide through polished tile. 

“Yes,” Satya answers. The voice is too soft. It does not sound like Rose, in past or present tense.

“Sorry about the straps,” says the other, because his Bewear has bought Satya some sympathy. “We aren't told anything here but clearance levels. What are you?”

Mercenary guards: the high risk, high reward gamblers of gig economy workers. Best hiring practices involve waivers to mitigate liability. They're cost effective, as well, because you don't have to provide independent contractors with health insurance. Companies don't tell these people anything, in the mild to moderate likelihood of a few of them spying for intellectual property theft. Or priming for physical, garden variety theft. Sometimes both.

They're breaking protocol. They want to know what they are dealing with. Rose would fire these people on the spot, but Rose is dead, legally and functionally, and this is not one of his buildings.

_What are you?_

_Are they hurting you?_

“I'm not actually sure,” Satya replies, because it's not as if it is untrue. 

They stop in front of elevator doors. Bewear trainer punches numbers on a keypad while blocking the code with his palm. Wheelchair pusher raps slim, dark knuckles over the handlebars. He leans forward, close to Satya's ear.

“From the looks of it,” he starts, with more amusement than malice, “They vacated this whole wing to hold you. Your clearance level means that you did a lot more than tear the roof off a building. _Regular_ pokemon can tear roofs off buildings, if they were inclined to.”

It’s not his responsibility to remember how many shingles were dislodged.

“You look like one of my daughter's college friends,” the guard continues, gentler this time. “He likes bug types.”

“Bugs are nice,” Satya agrees placidly.

They wheel him inside. Music plays during descent, tinny and royalty free.

"My bet's on hyper intelligent Ditto," jokes Bewear guy. "Eidetic memory. Has 6 pre-stored forms with perfect IVs and hidden abilities they’re even not supposed to have. One of them's a pseudo legendary."

"Like that one movie? Your taste in film is garbage, Frankie."

"Boo hoo. No fun allowed."

Their conflicting tastes devolve into an argument that lasts for the duration of the elevator ride and two more hallways, before they park his chair by the double doors of what appears to be a lab behind frosted windows. Wheelchair pusher briefly puts a hand over his shoulder and it nearly makes Satya jolt out of his seat. This does not go unnoticed - the man regards him with crossed arms while Frankie unlocks the door.

They wheel him inside and park the chair by a group of five female staff members in lab coats. Steel tables; modern design. Standard issue white and grey. His eyes scan the floor, covered in white tile with tasteful metallic inlay. Oleana made those prototypes during her secondary education, and used the passive income from royalties to coast through her studies with minimal financial burden. In the event of a disaster, it can paralyze intruders, or wayward lab pokemon. 

Everyone is sporting rubber soles. They haven’t provided him with slippers. Surely there’s a lesson here, somewhere.

The men leave. One of the women introduces herself with bedside manner expected from hospitals, and informs Satya that they will be taking samples. (Rate your pain from 1 to 10. Breathe in and out slowly.) He cannot decide if the human face he wears makes him more disarming, or more suspicious. He cannot decide if their touch, however brief, is alarming or welcome, because half of him has never experienced being held beyond a girl’s tiny palm, barely larger than one of his broken scales.

A hand trims off slivers of his hair. Another clips his nails into a glass decanter. 

He imagines Oleana’s hands in sea-wet clumps of dark ink, brushing strands away from his eyes.

* * *

_“Alex, it's just me. You didn't recognize me with glasses?”_

_(But forbade you him to slay-)_

_“You didn't tell me you were working here.”_

_She turns her head back to the screen. His feet root him in place._

_“I wanted to earn this job out of my own personal merit.”_

* * *

Sycamore scrawls notes on a leather-bound with rounded corners. They aren't using the strap chair today, though they still haven't offered him shoes. Trust building exercises are excellent for bolstering morale. This room even has windows, though the skyline is nothing but unfamiliar trees and mountains.

(Rural area? Sinnoh? Kanto?)

“How are you feeling today, Satya?”

_(What would you like to be called?)_

Professor Augustine Sycamore. Mega-evolution specialist and prolific writer. His mop of dark gray is longer and looser than expected for men his age, and the waves bob faintly with the stroke of a pen. Satya has read most of his books, including the poorly received ones in later life that delve more into fringe conjecture than what is currently acceptable. _A moonshine jug of a book,_ Oak had disparagingly noted of his latest, before dying of a heart attack at 85. Said book does not have nearly as many unhinged paragraphs as Hop’s publishing debut, but as a child chosen by a god, he’s entitled to that privilege.

> _“We don’t tame them - they choose us when we’re new. When you are young and new you are easier to shape, because soft clay yields to hands more eagerly than stone-”_
> 
> _“9/10 stars, makes good background audio when you’re high as balls. I bought the rights to use some passages for a future experimental album!” - @piersbandofficial_
> 
> _“Hop what the hell” - @battletowerleon_
> 
> _“A tonne of people got this book and never read it because they thought Prof Hop was hot in that one Leon biopic. Great marketing tactic, proper ruthless” - @marnieperishsong_
> 
> _“Highly recommended. A must-have introductory primer for those interested in Pokegod mythos.” - @ballonleabede_
> 
> _“Read Hop’s book! I didn’t understand most of it but it was great!” - @galarachampiongloria_

Mega-Evolution is a close enough analog of Dynamaxing, which makes for a sensible hire. The man’s proximity to the long-disbanded Team Flare’s Lysandre, however, is what must have sealed this responsibility. They’ll plan for many contingencies, including a reformation route, in the event that there is anything to reform. They’ll plan for resistance and they’ll plan for violence. They’ll take emotional transference into consideration.

The staff have taken to sneaking him food that’s actually edible, and one of the guards won’t stop rambling to Satya about his daughter for hours on end. Did they plan for that too? What notes do you write for the capacity to sway sympathy? What safety measures do you make for strangers growing attached to a monster who’s wearing a dead man’s skin as a coat?

_“I don’t know what to get for her birthday. I never know what to get for her birthday. It hurts a lot, to know that she doesn’t need me.”_

_“That’s not something to mourn. If she doesn’t need you, it means you did your job as a parent correctly. Does she want you around even when she doesn’t need you? This is what you should really be asking.”_

_“I guess so. Thanks, kid. You probably didn’t destroy a town or anything like that. Got a hunch, and I’ve been at this for a while. They’re usually right.”_

_“Uh-”_

“I’m fine,” he answers delicately. “It’s a little chilly here, though. I used to be able to tolerate the cold better. Don’t know where that went off to.”

“I’ll ask the staff to get you a sweater.” Sycamore smiles; milquetoast and inoffensive. “Do you find that many of your preferences and old habits have been changed or altered? Which half of you has retained more of their old traits?” 

Rose counts the seconds. Satya nearly scowls.

“Thank you- um. _Half_ is- half is a bit of a misnomer.” He hesitates. Half is correct in terms of mass retained, but slicing a cake into equal parts doesn’t carry the same weight as placing two fruits into a blender. 

The professor laces and unlaces his fingers; fiddles uncomfortably with the click pen. “Can you elaborate?” 

“There’s this disconnect when I review either of their memories. There’s always some sort of separation when someone older remembers what their younger self did, but this is different.”

Ishmael. Lonely nature. In a landscape of immense scarcity, to covet and to destroy may as well be the same. To love and to devour are near-indistinguishable flavors that end up in the same stomach.

Either way, Rose is dead.

(Shit. That almost looks like pity.)

“How so?”

* * *

2.

Bmfy dtz hfqq Jyjwsfyzx nx f wfwjw ymfs fajwflj xhfajsljw xujhnjx. Dtz mfaj dtzw qnyyqj hwjfyzwjx ymfy kjfxy ts ijfi xpns hjqqx, fsi dtzw xzwkfhjx btzqi gj inwynjw bnymtzy ymjr. Ymnx nx tzw uwnrfwd kzshynts, gzy ts f qfwljw xhfqj. Bj lwtb qfwljw ymfs xzujwstafx ns nijfq hnwhzrxyfshjx, ymtzlm rtxy tk ymj zsnajwxj nx jruyd jcufsxj, fsi ymjwj nx sty tkyjs jstzlm yt jfy yt lwtb yt ymfy xnej. Ns ymj jajsy ymfy htsxjwansl fsi nshwjfxnsl rfxx uwtajx ytt inkknhzqy, bj’qq xmji fbfd jchjxx rfyyjw. Lwfanyd ktwrx ymjr nsyt wtzsi, tw tgqtsl xmfujx. Xtrjynrjx ymjd bnqq mfyhm nsyt rtwj Jyjwsfyzx. Rtxy ynrjx ymjd inj gjktwj gjnsl gtws, fsi htsywngzyj ymjnw bfxyj rfyjwnfq yt xyfw xdxyjrx.

Bj fwj qfwljqd xtqnyfwd hwjfyzwjx, ymtzlm xtrj tk zx fwj xywfslj jstzlm yt jsotd ywfajqnsl ns ufnwx. Rtwj tkyjs ymfs sty, ktti nx xhfwhj, fsi nk ns ymj jajsy ymfy bj knsi f wtfrnsl hwjfyzwj nsxyjfi tk f uqfsjy, jfynsl ymjr nx ufw ktw ymj htzwxj. Fqyjwsfyjqd, gj jfyjs, nk dtz fwj ymj xrfqqjw tk ymj ybt. Nk dtz fwj f ywfajqnsl ufnw, dtzw fhy tk hfssngfqnxr nx htsxjsxzfq. Tkkjsxnaj htsxzruynts itjx sty zxzfqqd wjxzqy ns uwjxjwafynts tk ymj ijfi’x rnsi, zsqjxx dtz ktzsi ymfy gfyyqj rjrtwfgqj jstzlm tw zxjkzq jstzlm yt gtymjw wjyfnsnsl ny.

Rj? Bmfy fgtzy rj? It dtz pstb mtb gtwnsl ny nx yt it stymnsl gzy htsxzrj fsi ijxywtd ktw jtsx fy f ynrj? N uzy rdxjqk yt xqjju. Bmd nx ymnx zszxzfq? Dtz mzrfsx xujsi f ymnwi tk dtzw qnajx zshtsxhntzx. It dtz pstb mtb xywfslj dtz xtzsi, Fqjc?

* * *

> _Dear Chairman Oleana-_
> 
> _\---- (redacted) ----_
> 
> _\---Thank you for straightening Leon out. Never thought I’d be sending this to you. I hope you didn’t tear into him too much, but whatever you said got him sober. You can be really awful, for the record, but both of us already know that ----_
> 
> _\---- (redacted) ----_
> 
> _\---- ----_
> 
> _Do not hesitate to message me if you are in trouble. I mean it. I don’t bail out just anyone. No energy for that nowadays, legendary or no legendary._
> 
> _-Hop_
> 
> _PS: Thank you so much for the book review. My sales spiked as soon as it went live. I can't believe you’re actually reading these! You know Leon doesn’t read them, right?_

* * *

In a simulation of the sea, fifteen-year old Alex watches a dragon tint the sky pink. He never remembers the shoreline when he wakes, for this secret is a treasure that his shadow shelf hoards in the dark. Weeks have passed, and all the creature does is circle him like a shark haunts a swimmer. He pulls out a sandwich, and throws crumbs of it into the water while the leviathan watches. Wishiwashi gather near sodden bread. Alex cranes his neck skyward, and weighs the pros and cons of trying to talk to this damn thing.

Cons:  
-potentially dangerous  
-definitely dangerous  
-may or may not induce death

Pros:  
-just a dream (?)  
-could be pokegod lottery  
-if so, who wouldn’t want to be remembered in history books?  
-can show it off to mum and rub it in her face  
-may or may not receive a wish out of it  
-may or may not induce death (???)

(Satya. Second of the five yamas. He’s already excellent at lying, and will use this skill if required of him.)

**_Child of man._ **

**_Child of man!_ **demands the monster.

**_Child of man, flower that blooms in the waste! Why do you not flee when I draw near?_ **

(Ishmael. Lonely nature. Bastard child or chosen child, depending on the book you read.)

“Well, first off, I’m kind of an idiot.” Alex scatters soggy potato crisps onto the sand. A wingull lands by foot. “Flower that blooms in the waste? They call those weeds. Thanks, I think?”

Slowly, agonizingly, the dragon curls inwards, its disc-like shape eclipsing the pale white of the sun. Smaller and smaller, it shrinks into something that is nearly a man, festooned in a dark armor that enshrouds him like thorns. The figure then floats to the borders of the shore, ghostly and weightless. Waves crash at cloistered feet without sound. There’s an image of this in his secondary school history books, somewhere, but he’ll forget this in the morning. No use wracking his brain over it.

(Inlaid between the script of monks: the stranger in antwerp blue, carapace gilded. They filigree his form in the folds of coptic stitch binding. Crush insects for blue pigment. Dry cherubi skins for delicate reds. In the years that pass, he’ll refine machines from these patterns that he hides from his waking self. In the brutal passage of time, Oleana will complete the Dynamax band shortly after attempting to assault his mother, and he will only half-heartedly scold her. In the veil of containment, he will-)

“What is your name?” asks the man-monster (monster-man?). “You use names here, correct? You are welcome to give me a lie. A placeholder will do for the sake of convenience.”

“You first,” Alex wagers with a grin, crumpling an empty chip bag in his fist.

“Fascinating,” the creature says with a laugh that can pass as gentle, though it is not an answer at all. The tide rises to the mid-waist of his armor, and Alex wonders if it has bothered to construct a face underneath the visor. 

If he lifts the helm from the monster’s head, would there be nothing inside? _There’s nothing inside me,_ he’d think to himself more times than he’d readily admit -- but one of his schoolmates loves chicken skins so much she said that the meat that it shelled was worthless in comparison. Maybe insides aren’t that important, if his mother is any indication.

It ventures two steps towards him. Alex swallows.

“I have never needed a name.”

“I’ll name you once I know you better,” the young man proposes, his fear concealed like a firefly struggling under his palm. “But not now. That’s not something you should entrust to someone you don’t know.”

“You would? You would do that... for me?”

“I- sure?”

(▒▒ ▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒ ▓▓ ▒▓ ▒ ▒▓▒▒. Lonely nature. He fell to the earth in a burning nimbus and the ashes of his ravaged flesh became a country.)

“Is this a promise?”

* * *

3.

“Isn’t all interaction rife with annihilation in some way? Your best options are to find something that destroys you in a way that benefits you. Don’t you humans make chemical peels out of pineapple rinds and market them to women with perfectly acceptable skin? Look at what you've all done with this place. Stealing water that’s free and then selling them back to the places you stole them from. Regional Corsolas changing into ghost types.”

_(Smooth. Did the EIQ die with the businessman? What next? Gonna go eat camp food that falls on dirty grass?)_

Sycamore takes a long swig from his coffee mug.

“Do you not consider yourself human, Satya?”

It takes him humiliatingly long to process what is asked, and any answer could potentially damn him. It took three days to convince his keepers to let him walk without restraints, and two and a half more for the professor to lend him a sweater he keeps in his office. Guard-with-daughter keeps bringing him chocolates in the shape of bugs. Guard-with-Bewear keeps calling him kiddo. A wrong reply could lose him any number of these conveniences.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I do. It’s confusing for me.”

“On some occasions you refer to Rose and Eternatus in both first and third person, often in the same sentences.” A beat. The professor adjusts his tie; runs his fingers on the brushed metal of his travel cup. “It’s in my professional interest to be wary, but in my personal opinion, I don’t believe that you intend to hurt anyone. At least, not on purpose.”

Satya wrings the fabric of his loaner sweater. “Benign versus malicious intent is a pointless argument when the end result is the same.”

“A human argument,” Augustine corrects gently, the delivery akin to checking a king. “Most of them are pointless. You're prioritizing the harm caused over the intent, which speaks for itself.”

* * *

4.

International Police deals almost exclusively in filling their Rolodex of villainous teams to keep an eye on, and prevention of any potential cataclysmic events involving monsters with more destructive power than ripping the shingles off your neighbor's roof. The highly contested (and frequently memed) _Hop's Law_ states that aforementioned events are inevitable, and are scheduled to occur and be thwarted at least once or twice a decade. Oleana knows enough to be aware that the professor counts their particular fiasco as one of these occasions. There are bigger mountains to die on than to bother correcting him.

To his benefit, he is infinitely more personable than his older brother, but spending your formative years as a shadow makes many people agreeable whether they want to be agreeable or not.

_("Doesn't it feel like putting a coat on, sometimes? It never stopped feeling that way, for me." Satya kneels close to the ground with a ziploc bag of mixed nuts, smiling while birds argue over bits of pecan. "It's light enough to forget that it's a coat, sometimes. It makes you look larger than you really are, but at the end of the day it's just a costume.")_

“Zamazenta's gone to his head,” Leon complained once. More than once, Oleana recalls, and to label some of his words as complaints would be charitable. Enough drunken rants get plastered on his checkmarked Swablr account to make her wonder how Hop can be so capable of exercising patience with him.

“You're going to lose him if you continue on this path,” was her only advice to the former champion at the time. “You learned how to lose too late in life, but you’d best get better at it if you want to keep him.”

The less charitable remarks came later. She can be uncharitable too. She’s done it for far longer than Leon.

Oleans keeps Hop’s thank you letter in her office drawer. It is three pages too long to be done out of nothing but civility. That, and she will graciously accept reminders that she is not a hopeless woman from just about anybody, and she certainly needs them now.

She packs it in the front pocket of her suitcase like a warding talisman. She doubts it will be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter mirrors the chapters involving imprisonment, and to some degree this whole fic is structured like a mirror. Castle has a tiny bit more structural planning than my other works, and I am seriously debating an Easter egg glossary in the final chapter notes if enough people want it.
> 
> I didn't expect any of this to get this far, or to be so well received, and I'm grateful for all of your comments. Thank you so much for your patronage.
> 
> (Apologies for pop quiz cipher in the middle of the chapter. [The decode is here.](https://pastebin.com/Q7EwjXiZ))


	13. Satya, by the Labs

He is so much smaller than Oleana remembers. 

Newly minted Cinnabar Labs employs a standard floor plan for clinical settings: inoffensive blocky design, with brushed steel elevators and neatly arranged instruments. Decor leans toward practicality rather than comfort. Her patented paralysis tiles from undergrad clack beneath black heels, and she seats herself on the end of the table closest to the door. Alex's ghost waits on the opposite side, fingers clasped together while wearing a patient expression. 

They've dressed him in burial whites, and his face holds more peace than he’s ever carried alive. She plays _spot the difference_ on his flawless corpse, like any good biotechnologist, but there are already too many to count. Red flecks stipple the watery greens of his irises. His posture is too straight and his nails are dark and gleaming. The change has folded him into a compact space, but somehow he occupies the entire room. 

“Alex,” she ventures. It is his oldest name. It is his oldest face too; soft and weary and not yet hardened by time. “Alex, is that still you?”

“I’m sorry, Oleana,” he says to her, lowering his eyes as he leans forward to take her hand, enclosing it between smooth palms. 

Her breath stops behind her lips, and somehow the tears come, hot and sharp to erode at her warpaint. She thinks she knows the answer, until she doesn’t- because Rose would provide, and Rose would promise, and Rose would beg her not to cry, but Rose would not say sorry. _Alex_ would say sorry, frequently and sincerely, but Alex is dead; shelved safely in the deepest layers of a flower whose petals grow as armor. To peel the matryoshka would squander the blossom. This person saying sorry is a stranger.

She savors his words all the same, guilty as she does for indulging a shadow. The specter grazes his thumb across her knuckles. This was common sense when she was a child, to believe that by eighteen you know the world like the back of your palm. To view this mirror with the eyes she has now borders on torture.

He is smaller than she remembers and it wounds her. He is kinder than she remembers and it wounds her too, somehow worse than the former, somehow worse than him dying more times than a human should die. She makes the cry of an animal in a trap, shielding her face with her free hand. 

“I don’t understand,” Oleana chokes, loathing how he holds her wrist like a penitent holds a holy object. “I don’t understand any of this. I hurt you. I should be the one apologizing.”

“I allowed it because I thought it would make us even. I thought it was something I owed you, for the times I hurt you.” 

Satya. Unisex name- truth. Has he been _Satya_ and not _Alex_ from the moment he offered her the option to call him by that name? Did _Rose_ die in the capsule?

“I should have just been honest with you. There's so many things I could have done better by you, and tolerating pain doesn't count as an apology or make amends. I'm sorry, Oleana.”

Wasn’t that all they ever did? Tolerate pain in lieu of an apology, and then do it again. And then do it over and over and over, until they manage to convince each other that it’s noble, that it’s normal and ordinary to bear burdens that neither of them wanted to carry.

 _Dying for someone easy,_ Oleana thinks, though it is only a half truth in the presence of a ghost. 

She’s killed her wants often enough to know.

> _“Can I call you by your name?”_
> 
> _“Which one?”_

“Are you Alex?” she reiterates, trembling from shoulders to knees. She does not pull her hand away. “Answer me. Are you still Alex?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry."

Catalog what is different. Catalog what is the same. Standard procedure. His face is gentler, though the shape is about the same- more or less. (There’s something missing, or something added.) Straighter posture, even when taking into consideration how polished Rose kept himself in public events. It calls to mind strange monsters in Glimwood Tangle; all soundless floating with no regard for gravity. 

She can’t pinpoint what is different about his voice. It is younger, certainly, but her memories of Alex and the cadence of this mimic do not quite align so much as slightly overlap. 

Oleana will still take him, either way. It’s the only piece left that she can hold onto.

“Can you show me what’s changed?” she asks, denying to herself that she is afraid. 

The stranger nods. He releases her palm and stands, then walks to her side of the table, stopping close to her chair. Oleana swallows; eyes darting to her shoulder where his hand pauses to rest. It is light; near weightless like the midday sun, filtering through frosted glass that blot out the mountains. If Alex is a ghost, he is one with a solid shape. 

“This doesn’t hurt me,” he starts, hesitant and bordering on embarrassed. “I mean- Ishmael spent most of his time in the champion’s team wishing he was smaller so that Gloria could hold him. I guess those opposites cancelled each other out.”

“Can I- can I hold you?” 

Regret seeps instantly, and shame washes over her like ice water. Oleana curls closer to the back of the chair, but the stranger in her savior's skin watches without motion or judgment. His face eases as he nods.

Oleana rises. Today's shorter heels allow them to meet at the eyes and she commits to storing this memory in a shelf higher than the others. He is a ghost with mass, but isn't she as well? Isn't everyone? They'll house their ghosts like dolls inside dolls, the years hardening with new layers to bury and protect. Her arms find his shoulders, and for once this is one phenomena she hesitates to dissect.

Alex relaxes in her hold- the opposite of what she has grown accustomed to, though she still doesn’t know if her hands are welcome or merely tolerated. This body is old but it is also new, and every time she thinks she knows his shape he changes form, from solid to liquid to mist in the air.

You can’t hold mist in your arms. 

“I’ve loved you for so long. I’ve hated you for just as long. I wanted you to hate me,” she confesses, and tightens her grip; fingers padding over thin fabric. If she lets go he’ll disappear again. If she lets go he’ll leave her. “I wanted you to hate me like I hated you.”

“I know,” he says, too gentle for the occasion, settling his head over her shoulder. She thinks of limp prey animals; soft flesh in the maws of wolves, though even now it is impossible to tell who is who.

Shouldn’t have worn mascara today. Her tears sting worse with it.

“You always did love playing the hero.”

“I know.”

A human would recoil from this grip.

“I felt like nobody without you, and you did little to convince me otherwise.”

“I know.”

A human would run.

Her arms ache. It takes her too long to realize she’s been shaking, and she hastily pulls away from the monster, swallowing air in raspy gulps. A bruise blossoms on the side of his neck where her palm has traveled, though his body is as still as it had been when she first entered the room; more specter than man.

“You’re not Rose,” Oleana croaks, digits gripping the chair for leverage.

“I have his memories,” says the impostor, though the afternoon light flatters him like her mother’s cardstock cutouts of Renaissance angels; taped to the living room like useless talismans. They didn’t save her then and they won’t save her now. “I’m not sure if that’s the same. You can transfer phone memory to a new machine. What constitutes the item? The machine or the memory?” 

He steps forward to close the distance. She staggers and falls to the ground, and down he follows, kneeling beside her like he's traveled the world for this specific pilgrimage. Knowledge knows that dragons don’t actually eat humans; wisdom knows that her heart will pound under her bones regardless.

“I hate Rose too,” Satya tells her; face contorting in barely concealed disgust, and if she didn’t know better she’d probably laugh at the absurdity of it, because he looks so much more like him with those words out of his mouth. “You humans have all this knowledge and yet somehow you work backwards to find the conclusion. Does it kill any of you to be honest? Do you all like to cause problems on purpose?”

Oleana opens her mouth, and then closes it again. A part of her has long acknowledged that she came here to seek immolation, so she reaches out to graze the dark mark on his neck. He doesn’t swat her hand away, because he isn’t human and he isn’t Rose. Rose is dead.

“I have his memories, which means I have his attachments too,” he continues, eyes half lidded as he casts away his gaze. "He could have just been honest with you. You could have just been honest with each other.”

 _His lashes are longer,_ she notes, nigh irrational. Of all the things to notice now. Blue-black nails, trimmed to the quick; a sense of stillness even when he moves. The awful way he leans into her palm, worsening the bruise, though he doesn't seem to notice himself. 

Oleana sucks in a breath. "Do you hate me?"

“I don't have a reason to. You're going to be my keeper when I leave, won't you? That's why you're here. It would be detrimental to hate you-”

“-don't do that,” she interrupts, pulling away her fingers. “You're going to make it worse.”

There he is. The moment is brief, like an illusion or a momentary flash of light behind the stranger's eyes. It looks like shame. It looks like-

"It doesn't hurt,” he sputters, and his index traces the mottled mark. This doppelganger is just human enough to know indignity. “I don’t think- I don’t think you can understand even if i explain it to you. Half of me was- was too big to be held. Gods this is humiliating-”

She pictures a wax carving of a man left to melt in the sun. Heat incinerates the paraffin, and the softened shell falls away to reveal flesh.

Satya’s nails scrape at the fabric of his pants. He lowers his head.

(It's different.)

(It’s the same.)

Oleana sighs. “I’m sorry. I squeezed you too hard.” 

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Really.”

She’s not equipped for this. She was never equipped for this. She doesn’t know what to call him. What shelf? What category? Quiet nature. Ostensibly Dragon type. Low speed and High special attack. A fusion. A corpse. An effigy. Satya by Cinnabar Labs. That’s all that’s left to her. Maybe she should just be grateful. 

His first death didn’t allow her to bury his body, but at least his second one will preserve it indefinitely.

She opens her palms and allows him to sink into her arms. Satya slots into the space between her limbs without effort or revulsion, like he’s always belonged there; like she didn’t just harm him in her selfish fit of damnation just moments before. That much, he shares with Rose, and it’s more than enough rope to hang herself with. 

* * *

Neither Bede nor Hop have brought up how bizarre it is that most of their current stay-at-home date nights involve watching the 890 video files. Oleana encased both written records and digital MP4s in an archaic red Micro-SD separate from the rest of her packaging (Rotom-free, practically analog at that point). To hold footage and notes of a world destroying monster in a plastic device smaller than the pad of his thumb must count as some form of poetic cinema, even if he doesn’t entirely understand it.

“Physical’s a lot more secure than digital in a lot of ways, if you have the option.” Hop scoops a hand into caramel popcorn, and tosses one into Bede’s mouth before rummaging through folders with a smart-tv remote. “I have an old laptop without an internet connection for note taking, but a leather journal still beats a machine that can die.”

 _A machine that can die,_ Bede repeats to himself, while clinging to his partner’s arm.

📁Day 8  
📁 Day 9  
\---> 🎦 morningintake.mp4  
\---> 🎦 visitationnoaudio.mp4  
\---> 🎦 eveningintake.mp4  
\---> 📝 day9notes.txt  
📁 Day 10  
\---> 🎦 morningintake.mp4  
 **\--- >** **🎦** **attackanalysis.mp4** **  
**\--- > 🎦 eveningintake.mp4  
\--->📝 day10notes.txt

“He signed a consent form for this, right?” he asks while Hop pulls up day 10’s attack analysis. “Is this even legal?”

Hop laughs to ease the tension, but his mouth cannot help but harden into a thin line. “Verbal consent. Law is going to be fuzzy around the edges for something like this. Rose is legally dead, but technically this fusion is half of him. Do they treat this as a person with rights? Do they treat this as a weapon that villainous teams can potentially abuse?”

The video fizzles to life, displaying a reinforced circular room, devoid of ornamentation and not unlike a smaller scale version of Leon’s battle tower. A female scientist taps settings on the side before backing away to pull up a folding chair, seating herself besides the subject. She writes notes on her tablet while Satya fidgets with the strings of his hoodie.

“Today you’re going to attack our Rotom. Please refer to her as Suzy,” the woman says with a pleasant hum as she gestures to a metal pillar slowly rising from the spoke of the circle. “Don’t worry about hurting her. She lives to collect data.”

“Ah. Hi Suzy,” says the young (???) man (??????), raising a palm towards the smooth, formless metal column. It is Copperajah width and grazes the high ceiling with a clean, pneumatic sound. 

Suzy chirps as though pleased, or at least, as pleased as faceless steel can sound. “Greetings! Ghost/Dragon, Quiet Nature, Height 5’8” or 173cm. I’m having some difficulties measuring your weight. Do you happen to be levitating?”

“Ghost/Dragon?” the researcher murmurs, eyes darting away from her notes. “Did the typing change?”

Bede hunches forward, chin propped on his palms. He's grateful that Hop is allowing him to see this at all, for reasons unrelated to academic research. Hop considers this a useful exercise, though less psychiatric loan words during viewing would only enhance the experience.

(Unload trauma. Exposure therapy. Closure. Of course he means well, but it's humiliating.)

Subject 890 shakes his head. "I don't know."

“You ought to be registering heavier on the tiles, if your mass is any indication,” Suzy provides while the scientist jots furiously with her tablet pen. “How very neutron star of you.”

890 raises a brow, but keeps any comments to himself. Not-Rose looks about their age- maybe younger, though even through video he doesn’t quite read as an mortal imprint. The unusual stillness of his frame reminds Bede of fairies and their deadened footsteps, muted even through tall, dry grass. Bare feet pad silently over decorative tiles.

“When do they give him shoes?” Bede cannot help but comment. “Sandals, at least?”

He hears Hop breathe in sharply, before his palm stops to rest behind pale curls. “He gets socks eventually. I think.”

The scientist stands, pausing to ruffle Satya's head, only to immediately pull it away. Her anxious laughter smooths over the offense. "Sorry. Force of habit. The girls watching this footage are gonna have a field day. That's a HIPAA violation, Fernie!"

"HIPAA is Unovan health law," Satya says, seemingly unfazed. "We're not in Unova, and I doubt I'm covered by human laws anyway."

Her face sobers. "Regardless, I shouldn't be touching you without consent, and for that I apologize. Uh… well. So you're gonna attack Suzy. Usual turn based stuff, and in the next few days we'll switch up the combat modules for different measurements. I'll be outside the arena, so if you get hurt someone will come get you right away."

Satya’s face betrays a strange flash of emotion; missable if one were not actively searching for it. Bede isn’t shameless enough to ask to rewind and pause, so he tells himself that he imagined what he saw.

“Right then,” says the Rotom. “You may now proceed-”

_(it is my personal opinion that these findings are dangerous)_

“Fuck,” Hop whispers, frown deepening to a scowl. “I have no idea what that attack is.”

The pillar breaks with a trembling beam of light, scattering metal shrapnel throughout the enclosed arena. Suzy shrieks with an electric cry, and escapes her confines through the cracks under the exit, while Satya watches the wreckage, immobile and impassive. Steel flints tear through white fabric. Red droplets pool near his feet and the monster’s head lowers to observe the stain, as though wounds were a pipe leak rather than an injury.

Fernie howls through the intercom. The camera cuts to black.

  
  


* * *

\--->[ 🎦 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxFPS_OY2_Y) eveningintake.mp4

_(Shit. I'm never going to see Gloria again.)_

Day ten marks the triumphant return of the metal wheelchair with straps. He hasn’t earned the right to complain, but they could have at least given him time to apologize to the observational Rotom before wheeling him off to the infirmary. Evening intake with Sycamore is still on schedule, though now he'll need to bear it in a disposable hospital gown instead of actual clothes.

If he asks nicely enough, they’ll probably give him something else to wear. He should be grateful for retaining enough mortality to still feel shame.

“Why didn’t you dodge?” Mr. Rjin scolds, though not unkindly. No extended asides about his daughter today, it seems. “Quiet nature does cut speed down, sure, but I've seen you run the enclosed track. You could have pulled it off easy.”

“I didn’t anticipate it hurting that much, is all.”

A truth, of course. Not _the_ truth, but a facet of it. He did not anticipate it hurting, but he was also curious about the intensity and duration, in the unavoidable event of pain. Orderlies soaked cloth bandages in full restore, but the wounds are knitting together more slowly. Overall, these are all useful things to discover in a controlled setting.

“Jeez. What kind of answer is that?”

His minder parks the wheels in the middle of the hall, fifteen minutes away from the intake room. The fear that blooms is as irrational as it is familiar. Satya could easily liberate the guard's entrails, or even destroy the building if he were inclined to, but the hassle that comes from its aftermath isn't worth any momentary pleasure.

Trust exercises. Glorified trust exercises; all of it. They could at least give him socks. The electric paralysis tiles would still do their job with a negligible barrier of fabric, and his feet wouldn't need to be cold.

Rjin bends forward, inches by Satya's face, and his eyes alone disarm the bubbling malice. All a monster can anticipate is pain, and that's why Ishmael coveted him like high tide floods the mainland -- that much, Rose understood better than most humans did. Anticipate anger. Anticipate pain. Make plans to mitigate pain. Rinse and repeat. 

Oleana wore an identical face when they first met, and Alex before her, before he learned well enough to conceal it. A knobby hand hovers close to his cheek, but does not touch him. Satya's eyes water, inexplicably; like weeping after chopping garlic; like how plucking flowers from the root disturbs the ground.

“You don't recognize me, do you?” The stranger asks. He fishes a yellowed scrap of paper from the uniform's breast pocket. “Is it still you in there? Or maybe you're Rose and that monster's kid- however that goes. I don't know how any of this shit works.”

“I-” he starts, but cannot continue once the note unfolds. It is a sketchbook page, ripped cleanly from the left edge, with rounded corners. A young, sharp face glares at his viewers; every harsh line accentuated in blue pen. Time eroded much of those old angles, but the major landmarks are more or less intact.

“I know, I know. You told me to sell it,” Paul muses, pocketing the scrap with care. “I didn't want to, and luckily I didn't have to. This isn't an easy line of work, but it hires ex-convicts.”

Silence fills the empty spaces like high tide. Paul dabs a kerchief over Satya's eyes.

"Sorry. I don't have clearance to remove the restraints."

Paul R. with the beautiful hands, who ruined those knuckles while punching a certain prison guard in the mouth. Paul with the face he somehow neglected to recognize. His life went on well enough. He has a daughter now. In a few years time, maybe Leon's younger brother would have a child too. The professor seems mentally equipped enough for it-

“You could have said goodbye to the group first before you went on with assisted suicide.” Oh yes. Definitely Paul. The bite is the same. “I know you had your reasons, but shit. Dying isn't redemption. Actually, forget the group. You should have told _me._ People don't exist in a void, Rose. If you felt that bad you could have just. ▒ **I** dunno.”

His tears come with hiccups now; red and raw and new. Humiliation of humiliations. The handkerchief is getting soggy. 

“No one found out that you gave away your assets and remaining shares of the company once you went to prison until well after you died. Couldn't you have told someone you were hurting? Arceus knows how much of this crap we could have avoided-”

“I'm sorry,” Satya mumbles, because this is what is expected of him.

Maybe he is sorry, because his eyes won't stop leaking. He hates this body; loathes how easily **▒** it trembles. Paul kneels down to hold him, as best as one **can▒hold** another person who is strapped to a chair. Satya contemplates the uniquely human paradox of touch that simultaneously heals and destroys, but pushes the thoughts aside in favor of not thinking at all.

 **▒You** should clean up before you meet with the professor. Or don't, I guess. Maybe the fact that you can cry can help your case.”

He doesn't get a chance to, because their excursion has trimmed too much time from the schedule. Two unfamiliar guards flank the door to the professor's office when they arrive. Their fear hangs in the air like miasma; palpable enough to choke on; to rend claws into. Satya keeps his head low.

"What took you so long?" Asks one, tapping a foot out of aggravation, though the motion cannot conceal his terror. "This isn't shit you should mess with, Rijn. His face is cute and all, but it's not real."

 _He isn't wrong,_ Satya muses. Tear off the coat and the bones would survive. It has happened before. It can happen again.

The less mouthy orderly opens the door. Evening intake lasts an hour, and the professor is noticeably more alert today-

_Where are you?_

Gloria.

Gloria?

Gloria, you can see this, right? Is this working? I’m test driving these functions. I guess you can call these functions. You’re asleep right now. Can you? Can you see this? 

Oh. Okay. Good. This is a lot to cram in for a recap. I don't want you to worry.

You're not angry at me. I really didn't deserve you.

I’m a little surprised you aren’t here. Here as in, physically present. Leon has a physical shape when he’s dreaming, the few times I’ve visited him. Rose did too. He almost exclusively lucid dreamed. Are your dreams like films instead? Like third person shooters?

Anyway.

As far as indentured servitude goes, it was alright. I have mixed feelings about it now but I guess that comes with the territory? I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I don’t think I have a right to give my opinions about any of this, considering all that happened.

You’re probably never going to see me again, and that makes me a little sad. Would you even want to? Even if you were to bother to seek me out, I’m not exactly the same as I was before.

No, I don’t want to visit Bede. This sort of thing would probably spook him. 

Ahaha! He said that? All gods know is be nosy, eavesdrop, and lie. Well. He's not. He's not really wrong.

No, I guess I really didn’t know him that well. I don’t think I ever really wanted to be known either, and assumed likewise for most people. 

I really don't know anything. Human ethics are very uneven. You can't go shopping around for people's memories in their head or touch them without permission, but sometimes you can, and a lot of these rules don't apply to pokemon-

Getting off track.

I’m so sorry. I’m also grateful for your favor and protection, so thank you. Thank you is better than sorry, or so I’ve been told.

Goodbye.

* * *

📁Day 12  
\--->🎦 morningintake.mp4

“Gloria really only used me in Dynamax raids. The only move that stayed throughout the years was Dynamax Cannon. She would switch out the rest often, just to test their implementation. One of the joke slots was Charm.”

“Do you use charm on humans, Satya?”

“Ah. You're joking, right? I don't know half of the things this body does without my knowledge. If I'm doing it right now I swear it isn't on purpose.”

📁Day 13  
\--->🎦 morningintake.mp4

“Wishing star particulates tend to get into the lungs and pores of miners and other humans with hazardous jobs. I'm not really surprised that most of the Darkest Day cultists were from those industries. Alex had a severe case by his late teens, because he was taking the pieces from his job and grinding them into paint.”

“Paint?”

“Watercolor paint, initially. Later on it was for a prototype of a temporary tattoo that was bio conductive. So say, decorative arrows on the back of your palm that you can use to control your devices without a remote, if you paired your apps beforehand. Older versions of these things exist, but they needed a bulky exterior battery to work, while his didn't. The designs won him a full ride scholarship, and got him into Macro Cosmos.”

“Would you say Eternatus has power and influence over certain people with this… condition?”

“I wouldn't call it that. A lot of Galar is Ishmael's corpse. The plants that stem from it. The pokemon that eat the plants. The people that form pacts with pokemon. All of them are holding pieces of me in some way, but you don't get to use wifi until you have your receiver on, and even then your reception is likely going to be poor.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Do you _see_ Galar? People would want to tear that sort of internal structure down eventually. Darkest Day is just the fastest route.”

“Is that what Rose wanted?”

“I'm not answering that.”

  
📁 Day 15  
\--->🎦 visitationnoaudio.mp4

(30 minute clip. Chairman Oleana gives subject 890 packaged food and a small bag of clothes. They chat. She pulls out a travel brush from her purse and combs his hair while he eats. She appears to be complaining about the substandard conditions. 890 shrugs, and doesn’t seem to be concerned.)

  
📁 Day 16  
\--->🎦 morningintake.mp4

"Whenever he had traumatic events that would potentially damage his psych I would actively suppress them, or at least try to suppress his emotional reaction to them, should removing the memory prove difficult. His connection to me was severed during the Sylph Co. containment trials, due to the inherent nature of their machines. I suspect that this is why his body degraded. I was able to find him and salvage him when they took out his corpse for longer than usual, but extended separation from me significantly hampered my ability to regulate his-"

📁Day 17  
\--->🎦 visitationnoaudio.mp4

(Chairman Oleana sits very still while 890 draws her face in a book, occasionally glancing up at her.)

📁Day 20  
\--->🎦 eveningintake.mp4

“Of course he loved her. He wouldn't have gone through that amount of discomfort for anyone who wasn't Oleana, but they wanted different things from each other that neither were able to give. Are these questions necessary, professor? I-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The layout for this was very long, so I had to split it into two pieces. (Insert awful but chapter relevant Steven Universe joke here)
> 
> Poll for the readers: other than the shift cipher, what other coded/concealed text have you noticed in Castle?
> 
> Thank you again. I've been dripping this slowly for over half a year now, and the experience has consistently been humbling and surreal.


End file.
